Exercise is an important part of weight loss. Along with the right eating habits, the right exercise can produce much better and lasting results than dieting alone. But does the addition of lean muscle mass burn more calories? ? Does a pound of muscle burn 30 to 40 calories per day, as is often reported? Is gaining muscle the key to fat loss?
Successful weight loss starts with the right eating habits.
Some fat loss advice is akin to waving a magic wand. A very common piece of advice regards gaining muscle mass. According to this advice, you can burn lots of fat just by putting on muscle in the gym. In fact, it won’t even matter how much you eat because of the fat-burning effect of this muscle. A pound of muscle burns 30 to 40 calories a day.
Notwithstanding the fact that gaining a pound of pure muscle is not necessarily a trivial task, the idea here is that if you put on five extra pounds of muscle, that muscle, just by virtue of its existence, will burn at least 150 calories per day. Once you do the math, this seems quite mundane, doesn’t it? You’d have to be a professional bodybuilder to burn a significant amount of fat from resting muscle metabolism.
Putting On Muscle Is Not the Key to Weight Loss
In reality, putting on muscle is not the key to fat loss. Maintaining muscle, and trying to put on muscle, is one of the factors in successful and sustainable weight loss, leading to a more favorable body composition and perhaps helping to maintain metabolism (don’t think it is impossible to do without resistance training). And yes, the EPOC effect (post-exercise oxygen consumption) from intense weight training is nice, but its effect has been grossly overstated by many sources. What’s more, resting muscle does not really burn that many calories.
Does a Pound of Muscle Burn 30 to 40 Calories a Day?
Although this is the range most often reported, a pound of muscle does not burn 30 to 40 calories a day. A pound of muscle, in its resting state, burns perhaps six calories a day. Six calories are nothing to get excited about. Actually using your muscles burns a lot more, of course.
What the people reporting this inflated caloric number don’t realize is that any increased amount of fat-burning from added muscle has a lot to do with the act of training, recovery, and its effect on fat loss. In other words, once you stop actively training and building muscle, that extra muscle is not just going to sit there like a red-hot furnace, burning a significant amount of extra calories.
All exercise is an important part of weight loss, but it is not the only ingredient. Successful weight loss starts with the right eating habits. Although muscle tissue is an expensive tissue for the body to maintain, it does not, in itself, burn enough calories to allow one to eat whatever one wants and still lose weight.
