The argument for building muscle to lose fat seems to be a simple one.
For every single pound of muscle mass you gain, your rate of metabolism will rise by between fifty and one hundred calories each day.
As a result, building just a few pounds of lean muscle is going to melt away as many calories as running 25 miles each week.
All while you’re sleeping peacefully, seated at your 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 primary problem is that muscle doesn’t burn off 50-100 calories for every pound.
In actual fact, research shows that the resting metabolic rate of muscle is a lot less than a lot of people think – close to six calories per pound.
I ought to also point out that fat is a lot more than simply useless tissue. It produces proteins including leptin and cytokines, which will impact your rate of metabolism. Fat has a rate of metabolism of around two calories per pound.
If you were to get rid of a few pounds of fat and replace it with the exact same quantity of lean muscle, your resting rate of metabolism would increase by under 10 calories each day. That’s not enough to have any type of substantial influence on fat burning.
The approximations of the resting metabolism of muscle I’ve just provided do make one particular presumption – a constant rate of protein turnover.
However, strength training will accelerate protein turnover (which describes an increase in the speed of protein synthesis and breakdown) in the hours and days after training.
To put it differently, whilst the metabolic rate of muscle tissue while resting isn’t as much as a lot of people believe, the metabolic rate of muscle tissue while it’s recovering means that individuals with much more muscle mass are going to burn more calories during the post-training period.
The second issue is that you’d have to gain a massive amount of muscle mass to have a significant effect on your metabolic rate.
To burn an extra 10,000 calories per month – sufficient to get rid of almost three pounds of body fat – you’d have to add more than fifty pounds of muscle mass.
That’s a lot more than the average joe might build throughout their exercise lifetime.
Basically, the idea of building muscle to lose fat is really a flawed one.
Nevertheless that doesn’t mean that lifting weights is pointless if you’re wanting to shed body fat. Far from it. Lifting weights will improve your body composition in a couple of significant ways.
First of all, strength training uses up calories (and fat). Not only during your workout, but – provided you exercise intensely – after it’s finished too.
Next, if you don’t perform some kind of resistance training while you’re dieting, much of the pounds you drop will come from muscle as well as fat.
It’s also worth stating that the quantity of weight you drop will always be less important than where that lost fat originates from. Should you drop 10 pounds of fat while buildind 3 pounds of muscle mass, your weight on the weighing scales is only going to have dropped by 7 pounds. But you’ll appear thirteen pounds different.
Precisely what sort of weight training should you be performing?
A good strength training program really should 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 – barbells, kettlebells, fixed resistance machines, or even your own bodyweight – to get the job done.