Does building muscle help lose weight
How many times have you read an article about weight loss that contained a list of “fat burning tips” or any kind of advice aimed at helping you lose fat better, faster or easier?
And how many of those times did you come across the suggestion that weight training is super important, because it will allow you to build muscle… and building muscle will significantly help you burn more calories, increase your metabolism and burn fat faster?
You’ve heard it a million times, haven’t you?
The thing is, while this advice is based on truth, it’s mostly exaggerated bullshit.
Muscle Burns Fat? Kinda…
The theory goes a little something like this. The human body naturally burns more calories each day to maintain a pound of muscle than it does to maintain a pound of fat. Therefore, the more muscle you build, the more calories your body will naturally burn each day at rest.
Which means, just by building muscle, you’ll significantly increase your metabolism and turn your body into a calorie burning, fat melting machine… and this will obviously improve your overall fat loss progress.
Now, is any of that actually true? Technically speaking, it kinda is. For example:
- FACT: Your body really DOES burn more calories maintaining muscle than it does maintaining fat.
- FACT: This means that YES, the more muscle you build, the more calories your body will naturally burn each day on its own.
- FACT: Which means that building muscle DOES increase your metabolism.
- FACT: And this all means that building muscle definitely has the potential to help you lose fat.
With me so far? Good, because here’s where it all starts to get a little screwy.
You see, the problem with this theory/advice isn’t so much that it’s wrong but rather that it’s just highly exaggerated, way over-hyped (usually to sell some crappy product), and extremely insignificant in terms of the actual effect building muscle will have on helping you lose fat.
