How Building Muscle Helps Burn Fat

Metabollically Active

There are two types of mass in the body: free-form mass and lean muscle mass. Free-form mass constitutes anything in the body that is not related to muscle. This includes fat, bones, cartilage, ligaments, tendons and subcutaneous fluid, such as blood, plasma and urine. Muscle happens to be very metabolically active compared to fat. This means that it burns a lot of calories even while you are at rest or sleeping.

Circuit Training

You gain muscle by progressively overloading muscle tissue. This does not happen overnight. It takes weeks and months of dedicated effort and discipline. The effort that is put forth takes a lot of calories, which can contribute to fat loss. There are a couple of different ways to train that can make this happen faster. One of them is called circuit training. This type of training involves doing one exercise after another for each muscle group, then repeating the sequence. These workouts have high reps with lighter weights and short rest periods. Performing these type of workouts will increase caloric expenditure and build lean muscle mass. Both of these factors will help burn fat.

Compound Exercises

Compound exercises are done with the specific intention of gaining mass. But that doesn't mean that fat loss cannot be achieved. As a matter of fact, they can contribute to a high caloric expenditure. Compound exercises involve more than one joint range of motion at once. In these routines, more muscle fiber is recruited than in isolation exercises. This takes more effort, which burns more calories--and it also builds more muscle, which can eventually lead to higher metabolism. Some examples of exercises include squats, bench presses, military press, deadlifts and back rows.

EPOC

When you do high-intensity lifting to build muscle, your body burns a lot of calories for several hours after you finish. This is a phenomenon called EPOC, which stands for Excess Post-exercise Oxygen Consumption. When you finish your workout, your body tries to come back to pre-exercise oxygen levels. This process takes a high amount of caloric expenditure.

Resources

• EPOC