Build Muscle to Lose Fat: Will it Work?
The argument for building muscle to lose fat seems to be a straightforward one.
For every pound of muscle you build, your metabolic rate will increase by between 50 and one hundred calories each day.
For this reason, putting on a few pounds of muscle is going to melt away as many calories as running twenty-five miles per week.
All while you’re sleeping, 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 issue is that muscle doesn’t burn off 50-100 calories for every pound.
The truth is, research shows that the resting metabolic rate of muscle is significantly lower than a lot of people think – approximately 6 calories per pound.
I ought to also mention that fat is much more than merely inactive tissue. It produces proteins which include leptin and cytokines, which can impact your metabolism. Fat has a rate of metabolism of about two calories per pound.
If you were to lose a few pounds of fat and replace it with the exact same quantity of muscle, your resting rate of metabolism would go up by under 10 calories each day. That’s insufficient to have any kind of significant impact on weight loss.
The estimates of the resting metabolism of muscle tissue I’ve just presented do make one particular presumption – a constant rate of protein turnover.
However, lifting weights will speed up protein turnover (which describes a rise in the rate of protein synthesis and breakdown) in the hours and days after exercise.
In other words, while the metabolic rate of muscle at rest isn’t as high as some people think, the metabolic rate of muscle whilst it’s recovering suggests that people who have more muscle mass are going to use up more calories inside the post-training phase.
The next issue is that you’d need to build a huge amount of muscle mass to have a significant impact on your metabolic rate.
To burn an additional ten thousand calories every thirty days – enough to get rid of just about three pounds of excess fat – you’d need to add more than fifty pounds of muscle mass.
That’s much more than the average person is likely to build during the period of their exercise life span.
Basically, the very idea of building muscle to get rid of fat is a mistaken one.
But that doesn’t imply that resistance training is pointless if you’re trying to shed body fat. Far from it. Resistance training is likely to enhance your body composition in a few significant ways.
First of all, weight training can burn calories (and fat). Not only during your workout, but – given you exercise hard enough – after it’s done too.
Second, if you don’t perform some type of weight training while you’re dieting, a lot of the weight you shed will come from muscle tissue in addition to fat.
It’s also worth mentioning that the amount of weight you drop is a lot less important than exactly where that lost weight originates from. If you drop ten pounds of body fat while buildind 3 pounds of muscle, your weight on the scales will only have dropped by 7 pounds. But you’ll look 13 pounds different.
So what kind of weight training should you be doing?
An effective strength training program should really 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, sandbags, strength training machines, or even your own bodyweight – to get the job done.
