JohnBarban.com

The Claim: Adding an extra pound of muscle to your body causes you to burn about 50 more calories per day

Answer: FACTOID

Muscle tissue only burns about 5 calories per day. This is a well established scientific fact that you can easily verify with a quick browse through the scientific literature. The most metabolically active tissues are your internal organs (heart, liver, kidneys, brain etc).

There is a persistent factoid that 1 pound of muscle burns all kinds of extra calories and a common number cited is around 50 calories per pound of muscle. I’m not sure where this number comes from because there isn’t any scientific evidence to back this up.

If weight loss is your goal then adding muscle isn’t going to help. You gotta eat less calories.

John

Weight training is a relatively new phenomenon as the physical culture revolution started in the late 1800’s and took hold in the early 1900’s.

The introduction of ‘fitness clubs’ and structured weekly weight workouts isn’t more than 100 years old.

What Happens When You Stop Working Out (and using drugs)?

As of the day I’m writing this post the first generation of people who followed structured workouts has passed and the second generation (Arnold, Lou, Franco and the gang) are reaching their golden years.

This is an interesting time because we have very little historic data to look at when it comes to weight training. Very few people workout with weights, and of those, even fewer stick with it for a lifetime.

The first two generations had very few adopters and I believe that my generation (gen x) is the first with true mass adoption of a lifestyle that includes weight training. And even my generation has very few people who actually do weight training on a consistent basis. (for example I have been training with weights for the past 15 years and have never missed more than 2-3 weeks in a row)

Even the most famous of famous people who worked out seem to have discarded the practice in their later years.

This is despite a growing body of research that indicates working out with weights is probably the single best thing you can do for your overall health into your advanced years.

I personally will never stop. As long as I can still drag myself out of bed in the morning I will always lift weights.

It’s one of the only things that seems to help keep us ‘young’.

So if you currently lift weights, will you ever stop?

John

I was just chatting with a client the other day about weight loss and the challenges he is facing with it.

It seemed that most of his issues with weight loss had to do with things like the social atmosphere at work, going out for lunch with his co-workers, eating dinner with his family and other people who are not interested in trying to lose weight, passing by his favorite coffee shop in the morning and stopping in for a coffee and a muffin. Social events on the weekend and going out for dinner and a few drinks.

Sounds pretty standard to me. These seem like the same issues most people would have with weight loss. They sure are the same hurdles I’ve had to overcome to ever cut down my body fat so I can certainly relate.

But when we started to talk about muscle building the story seemed to change direction.

When it came to muscle building he was doing everything he could to try and build up muscle. He was hitting the gym faithfully 3-4 times per week, lifting heavy weights, doing the ‘big lifts’, taking a post workout shake, eating plenty of protein, even timing his protein, shakes and creatine doses etc…

But none of this fancy stuff seemed to matter and did very little for helping him build muscle faster.

And then I realized there is a huge misconception with fat loss vs muscle building.

Fat loss (or fat gain) is largely controlled and influenced by your environment.

Building Muscle (or not) is largely controlled by your genetics.

Following a well designed weight training program is about all you can do for building muscle. The gains come slow, and are determined by your genetics and your age. There really is nothing else that can influence muscle gaining (besides steroids).

Arnold and the boys knew that the workout was king for muscle building

On the other hand fat gain or fat loss is hugely impacted by your surroundings, who you eat with on a day to day basis, the eating and food culture in your country, your city, your place of work, and especially your family and house.

I think many of us recognize how much our environment can influence our ability to gain or lose fat, and assume it also has the same ability to influence our ability to gain muscle. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

If you’ve ever tried to lose a significant amount of fat you’ll know exactly what I am talking about. The workout or your genetics plays an insignificant role in weight loss compared to your ability to avoid going to that coffee shop for the muffin, or out with your buddies for wings and beer, or have a second helping of food at dinner, or go out for lunch with your co workers etc.

To sum it up, successful weight loss seems to be a matter of controlling and overcoming the influences of your environment.

Building muscle successfully without gaining fat is a matter of accepting the limited control you have over this process and accepting that hard work in the gym is all you need to do, and have the patience to let the gains come over time.

John

P.S. I have found Eat Stop Eat to be the easiest way to lose body fat and get control over the food environment that I live in.

I get questions about building and losing muscle a lot and I think most people simply aren’t picturing a muscle as it truly is.

Arnold's Muscles are Unreal, but even he has an upper and lower limit.

First of all there is a genetic predetermined amount of muscle you have that cannot be changed. This is set by the time you’re in your late teens. I’m referring to your somatotype (ectomorph, endomorph, or mesomorph).

You can’t change what kind of somatotype you are, but you can build up your muscle mass no matter where you are starting.

The only difference is the amount of muscle you will eventually gain is dependent on where you are starting.

Adding muscle isn’t like adding bricks to a house. Adding muscle is like filling up water balloons as full as you can get them.

The total number of muscles fibers you have on your body is fixed and cannot change. You can only take the muscle fibers you already have and make them bigger, you can’t actually create more muscle fibers. This is called Hypertrophy.

(adding new muscle fibers is called hyperplasia – this has never been shown to happen scientifically)

So picture it this way:

If you are starting with 100 muscle fibers, then all you can do is make those 100 fibers as big as possible, but you can’t make them into 110 muscle fibers.

On the other hand a guy who is naturally thicker and bigger than you might have 120 muscle fibers, so when he does the same workout as you he will appear to be adding more muscle because he is making his 120 fibers bigger than your 100 fibers.

So all things being equal this second dude will always look about 20% bigger than you because he is starting with 20% more muscle than you.

So the wrong way to look at muscle building is the brick analogy. We don’t build muscle by adding new bricks to the pile.

Muscles are NOT like bricks

So the way to look at muscle building is like filling water balloons.

Muscles are much more like Water Balloons

Your muscles are about 73% water, and the amount of water they are holding varies based on how you workout, and to a lesser degree on how you eat.

If you don’t workout and don’t eat much, you’re muscles will be less hydrated and hold less water and look smaller. If you workout and follow a sensible diet you’re muscles will be big full and hydrated.

That is the real difference with muscle building.

When you look at it this way the idea of ‘losing muscle’ doesn’t make any sense either.

You can’t really ‘lose’ muscle, they don’t disintegrate and disappear (even cadavers still have a substantial amount of muscles on them, so even after death muscles don’t disappear or disintegrate).

In reality muscles shrink or expand based on your workout intensity, and frequency.

Unless you are completely starving and never lift weights, you will never be in a position to worry about your muscles shrinking.

Even if you go through a traumatic event that causes a muscle to ’shrink’ (think of the way a muscle shrinks when you break a bone and you have to wear a cast)…you can easily bring that muscle back up to full size once the cast is off and you can lift weights again.

The bottom line is you can’t “lose” muscle. It can only shrink or expand, but the same muscle is always there.

John

Imagine if the devil came along and offered you the following deal:

A life of riches, fame and luxury if you could build 5 pounds of muscle over the next 28 days:

But if you can’t build 5 pounds in a month you’ll lose your job and end up flat broke for the rest of your life (and of course he owns your soul.)

A. Do you take the deal?

B. If so how would you go about building the muscle?

Please answer in the comment section below.

John