The case for building muscle to lose fat seems to be a simple one.
For each and every pound of muscle mass you put on, your metabolism will increase by between fifty and one hundred calories every day.
Because of this, gaining a few pounds of lean muscle will melt away as many calories as jogging 25 miles each week.
All while you’re in bed, sitting at your desk or resting on the sofa.
Or is it? I’m not so sure that building muscle to lose fat is a very good idea…
The initial problem is that muscle doesn’t burn 50-100 calories per pound.
In actual fact, studies have shown that the resting rate of metabolism of muscle is quite a bit lower than the majority believe – close to six calories per pound.
I should also mention that fat is more than just lifeless tissue. It produces proteins which include leptin and cytokines, which will impact your rate of metabolism. Fat has a metabolic rate of around two calories for every pound.
If you were to lose a few pounds of fat and replace it with the exact same amount of lean muscle, your resting rate of metabolism would increase by less than 10 calories each day. That’s not enough to have any kind of meaningful influence on fat loss.
The estimates of the resting metabolism of muscle tissue I’ve just given make one presumption – a constant rate of protein turnover.
However, strength training will increase the speed of 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, although the rate of metabolism of muscle while resting isn’t as much as a lot of people believe, the metabolism of muscle tissue whilst it’s recovering suggests that those that have increased lean muscle mass are likely to use up more calories during the post-exercise period.
Another issue is that you’d have to build a large amount of muscle mass to have a substantial influence on your metabolism.
To burn an additional 10,000 calories on a monthly basis – sufficient to get rid of very nearly 3 pounds of excess fat – you’d need to add more than fifty pounds of muscle.
That’s a lot more than the average joe might build during the period of their exercise life span.
In other words, the concept of building muscle to get rid of fat is really a mistaken one.
Nevertheless that doesn’t suggest that resistance training is pointless if you’re aiming to get rid of weight. Far from it. Strength training is likely to improve your body composition in a few important ways.
First of all, weight training burns calories (and fat). Not just during your workout, but – provided you exercise intensely – after it’s finished as well.
Next, in the event you don’t do some kind of strength training while you’re going on a diet, much of the pounds you lose may come from muscle in addition to fat.
It’s also worth pointing out that the quantity of weight you drop will always be less important than where that lost weight originates from. If you drop ten pounds of fat whilst gaining three pounds of muscle, your weight on the scales is only going to have gone down by 7 pounds. Yet you’ll appear 13 pounds different.
Precisely what type of strength training should you be engaging in?
An effective resistance training program really should be based on squats, deadlifts, rows, chin-ups (or pulldowns) and presses using heavy(ish) weights and low (5-8) reps. Use whatever resistance is available – barbells, sandbags, fixed resistance machines, or perhaps your own bodyweight – to get the job done.


