How Does Muscle Burn Fat?
by Yuri in Weight Loss
If you’re on a mission to get lean, you’ve likely heard before the importance of focusing on adding more lean muscle mass to your frame. Strength training is heavily emphasized in most workout plans and will make the foundation of what you should be doing in the gym.
But why is this? How come it is so important to build more muscle mass? Couldn’t you just perform more cardio and see the same, if not better weight loss? How is it that muscle burns fat?
These are some of the big questions that may be going through your mind right now so let’s stop for a moment and take into consideration the answers. There are three primary ways that muscle burns fat so by understanding these, you should have all the answers you need to realize just how important this tissue is.
The Calorie Requirements Of Muscle
If you’ve been staying current on what’s necessary in order to burn fat, you know by now that you must create a calorie deficit in the body, that is, where you are burning more calories through daily activity than you are consuming through food in order for fat loss to occur.
Generally speaking the greater the deficit you create, the faster you will see results.
One of the biggest contributors to your daily calorie burn however is something referred to as your basal metabolic rate (your BMR), which stands for how many calories you’d burn if you lied in bed all day and did absolutely nothing.
Muscle mass is a highly metabolically active tissue, meaning it requires a large number of calories just to keep itself running, therefore the more muscle mass you have, the higher your BMR is.
If you perform a regular strength training program and build up 10 pounds of muscle, you may see your metabolic rate increase by a good 150-200 calories per day.
While this may not seem like that big of a deal, it will really add up over time. If everything else stayed constant this would mean you’d burn approximately 6000 more calories per month or 72,000 calories per year, which is the equivalent of 20 pounds of body fat.
You know that weight that seems to come on each year that you can never really shake off? Well, if you had that extra 10 pounds of lean muscle on your frame, that weight wouldn’t have come on in the first place – and you wouldn’t have had to increase your exercise levels or changed your diet either. You would have simply have burned the extra calories off naturally.
The Carbohydrate Needs Of Muscle
Another important reason why muscle mass helps you get lean is because it’s going to require more carbohydrates each day. Each time you do a workout you’re going to deplete your muscle’s storage of carbs (commonly referred to as muscle glycogen), so the more muscle mass you have, the more carbohydrates you can eat without gaining weight.
How does that sound? Rather than trying to focus on eliminating as many carbs from your diet as possible to lose weight, you could just focus on adding more lean muscle mass.
The Increased Intensity Ability Of Muscle
Finally, the last reason muscle helps to burn fat is because it also will allow you to exercise at that much higher of an intensity level. As you likely may already know, the higher the intensity level that you’re able to workout, the more calories you will burn both during the workout as well as after it’s been completed.
So by adding more muscle mass, you’ll see better results from each and every workout you do.
So there you can clearly see just why muscle burns body fat. The more of it you have, the leaner you will be.
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