Does Building Muscle Burn Fat? If So, How Much Fat Per Day?

Not only does muscle burn fat just by virtue of hanging off of your bones and sucking in (burning) calories to retain its life and mass, but if you work with the muscles in the right way (as you will be shown in this article) you will be able to supercharge their capacity for burning fat and will be able to get into the best shape of your life. It’s all so easy when you know how.

How your muscles burn fat:

Just by being there:

That’s right. The muscles you have right now – even if you haven’t rigorously exercised them in a long time – are burning calories and contributing towards keeping you from gaining fat from excess calories. It’s thought sedentary muscles burn around 5-15 calories each day per 1lb of muscle mass.

If a person has 50lb of muscle on their body their muscle mass will burn between 250-750 calories each day without having been exercised (provided the muscles don’t atrophy from lack of activity).

Putting this into context, a single pound of body fat consists of around 3500 calories.

By being used for strenuous activities:

Every activity you perform which tires the muscles means you are using your muscle mass to burn more calories than they normally would. And, depending on the type of training you do, you could turn them into veritable fat burning furnaces for days afterwards.

Cardiovascular exercise

Cardiovascular exercise certainly works the muscles and the more of your muscles which are involved in the cardiovascular exercise the more calories you are likely to burn than if you only did dumbbell curls, for instance. If you intend on using cardiovascular exercise to burn fat, be sure you work the bigger muscle groups such as the legs and the back muscles or you are wasting your time – you simply won’t burn enough additional calories through only working out small muscle groups to burn fat. However, the body has many small muscles and if you put them all together they can all certainly contribute something far bigger – so think whole body cardio.

However, cardiovascular pales in comparison to progressive resistance exercise to burn fat.

Progressive resistance

There is no better way to leverage your muscles for the purpose of burning fat. Not only does building muscle burn fat because of the calories burned during what should be very strenuous and intense workouts, but the result is a breakdown in muscle protein which takes up to (and sometimes over) 72 hours to repair – and all the while it’s repairing, it’s burning more calories than it normally would. The result is significantly heightened fat burning for a prolonged period of time.

Again, it should be stressed that working the bigger muscles burns more calories. Full body programs split into different muscle groups over a few different days of the week is the best approach to take.

Never, ever make this mistake…

Do not ever go on a massive calorie restriction diet for a prolonged period of time and remain sedentary hoping to lose fat. Severe calorie restriction can work for short periods of maybe 24 hours, but any longer and your body will clamp down on fat burning and begin burning muscle mass to free up energy to fuel the essential processes of the body.

Whenever you are in a calorie deficit mode, if you aren’t regularly training the muscles with progressive resistance you aren’t telling your body how important it is to spare the muscle and inviting it to start catabolizing lean muscle tissue which is a disaster for your metabolism.

Just remember that muscle burns fat, and you can lose muscle mass very quickly if you aren’t careful, but gaining muscle takes far longer and is far more difficult in comparison. The moral? Spare the muscle mass you have and preferably seek to build even more to burn more fat!