Does Building Muscle Burn Off Fat?

The case for building muscle to lose fat appears to be a straightforward one.

For every pound of muscle you build, your metabolism will rise by between fifty and 100 calories daily.

As a result, gaining just a few pounds of lean muscle is going to burn as many calories as running 25 miles per week.

All while you’re in bed, seated at the desk or relaxing on the couch.

Or so the theory goes anyway. But the evidence for building muscle to lose fat is not very strong…

The primary problem is that muscle doesn’t burn off 50-100 calories per pound.

The truth is, research indicates that the resting metabolism of muscle is quite a bit less than the majority think – approximately six calories per pound.

I should also point out that fat is a lot more than just lifeless tissue. It releases proteins which include leptin and cytokines, which will have an effect on your rate of metabolism. Fat has a metabolic rate of around two calories per pound.

If you were to lose a few pounds of fat and replace it with the same quantity of muscle, your resting rate of metabolism would go up by under 10 calories a day. That’s not enough to have any type of meaningful impact on fat burning.

The approximations of the resting metabolism of muscle I’ve just given make one particular presumption – a consistent rate of protein turnover.

However, lifting weights will increase the speed of protein turnover (which means an increase in the speed of protein synthesis and breakdown) inside the hours and days after training.

To put it differently, whilst the metabolic rate of muscle tissue while resting isn’t as much as some people think, the metabolism of muscle when it’s recovering means that people who have much more muscular mass are going to burn more calories during the post-training phase.

The next dilemma is that you’d have to put on a huge amount of muscle to have a substantial influence on your rate of metabolism.

To burn an additional 10,000 calories a month – enough to lose just about 3 pounds of body fat – you’d need to add more than fifty pounds of muscle.

That’s much more than the average person is likely to build over the course of their exercise lifetime.

In other words, the concept of building muscle to lose fat is really a flawed one.

Nevertheless that doesn’t imply that strength training is worthless if you’re looking to lose body fat. Far from it. Strength training is going to improve your body composition in a few significant ways.

Firstly, resistance training uses up calories (and fat). Not only during your workout, but – as long as you exercise hard enough – after it’s done as well.

Next, in the event you don’t do some form of resistance training while you’re going on a diet, a lot of the weight you get rid of will come from muscle as well as fat.

It’s also worth mentioning that the amount of weight you drop is significantly less significant than where that lost weight comes from. If you drop ten pounds of body fat whilst buildind three pounds of muscle tissue, your weight on the weighing scales will still only have dropped by 7 pounds. Yet you’ll appear 13 pounds different.

Precisely what form of weight training should you be performing?

An effective resistance training routine should really be based on squats, deadlifts, rows, chin-ups (or pulldowns) and presses using heavy(ish) weights and low (5-8) repetitions. Use whatever resistance is accessible – barbells, sandbags, strength training machines, or perhaps your own bodyweight – to get the job done.

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