Is Building Muscle a Good Way To Burn Fat?

You’ll often see fitness marketing that says things like “Muscle burns lots of calories even when at rest, so you should build muscle to lose fat”

The reality is that this is “kinda true”, but not the way most people think.

First, it’s REALLY hard to gain muscle mass. If you train hours per week, add weight or reps every time, eat lots of protein, go to bed on time and stay in a calorie surplus, it’s possible for the genetically gifted to gain as much as 15-20lbs of muscle mass in their first year of training. In real-world numbers, even 6-10lbs is amazing progress.

According to the scientists, muscle requires about 6kcal per lb per day. So if you SLAUGHTER yourself in the gym for ONE YEAR, you could MAYBE raise your basal metabolic rate by 36-120kcal per day.

That’s not nothing, but instead of training for a year, you could create a 120kcal deficit TODAY by:

-eating 1 less slice of toast

-switching to black coffee or

-going for a short walk.

Of course, muscle doesn’t just burn energy at rest. It also weighs something, so every time you move, you have to expend energy to move your muscles too. Even if your basal metabolic rate only goes up by 36-120kcal per day, you gain a bit more advantage from movement too.

A person who exercises regularly might be using energy at a rate of 1.6-2.0 times their basal metabolic rate every day, so the added muscle might actually be worth 60kcal-240kcal of additional daily expenditure.

Again, that’s a lot more than nothing, but it’s not a good deal when you compare the ease of removing 240kcal per day from your diet to the difficulty of gaining 20lbs of muscle.

The advice should really be “when you are losing fat by eating in a calorie deficit, you should lift weights too. This helps prevent muscle mass loss so that you don’t end up looking like a bag of skin and bones”.

There are lots of other good reasons to build muscle mass: looking sexier, reducing joint pain, improving performance at you sport or life, being able to get more done in your workouts...but the idea floating around that gaining a few pounds of muscle is going to turn you into some kind of calorie-burning fat-furnace that loses weight while watching TV is pretty far off the mark.

Sorry.