The case for building muscle to lose fat seems to be a simple one.
For each and every pound of muscle you build, your metabolic rate will increase by between 50 and one hundred calories per day.
As a result, gaining just a few pounds of lean muscle will burn off as many calories as running 25 miles each week.
All while you’re in bed asleep, seated at the desk or resting on the couch.
Or is it? I’m not so sure that building muscle to lose fat is a very good idea…
The main problem is that muscle doesn’t burn off 50-100 calories for every pound.
In reality, research indicates that the resting metabolism of muscle is significantly lower than the majority believe – approximately 6 calories for every pound.
I ought to also mention that fat is a lot more than merely useless tissue. It secretes proteins such as leptin and cytokines, which can have an impact on your rate of metabolism. Fat has a metabolic rate of approximately two calories for every pound.
So if you were to drop a few pounds of fat and replace it with the exact same amount of lean muscle, your resting metabolism would increase by under 10 calories daily. That’s insufficient to have any type of significant effect on weight loss.
The approximations of the resting metabolism of muscle tissue I’ve just given make one particular presumption – a consistent rate of protein turnover.
However, strength training will increase the speed of protein turnover (which describes a rise 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 high as some people believe, the metabolism of muscle tissue while it’s recovering means that people who have much more muscle mass are likely to use up more calories during the post-exercise phase.
Another dilemma is that you’d have to gain a huge amount of muscle to have a major effect on your metabolism.
To burn an extra 10,000 calories a month – sufficient to get rid of just about 3 pounds of fat – you’d have to add more than fifty pounds of muscle mass.
That’s much more than the average joe is likely to build throughout their exercise lifetime.
In a nutshell, the idea of building muscle to lose fat is really a flawed one.
Nevertheless that doesn’t mean that weight training is pointless if you’re looking to shed body fat. Far from it. Lifting weights is likely to improve your body composition in a number of significant ways.
For starters, weight training burns calories (and fat). Not just during your workout, but – given you work out intensely – after it’s finished too.
Second, in the event you don’t do some kind of resistance training while you’re dieting, a lot of the weight you drop may come from muscle in addition to fat.
It’s also worth pointing out that the amount of weight you drop will always be much less significant compared to where that lost fat originates from. Should you drop 10 pounds of fat while gaining three pounds of muscle, your weight on the weighing scales will only have gone down by seven pounds. But you’ll look thirteen pounds different.
Precisely what type of strength training should you be performing?
A good weight training routine ought to be based upon squats, deadlifts, rows, chin-ups (or pulldowns) and presses using heavy(ish) weights and low (5-8) repetitions. Use whatever resistance is accessible – dumbbells, sandbags, strength training machines, or even your own bodyweight – to get the job done.