HPC-UK’s Top Tips for Fat Loss; Tip No.6– Exercise; Part 1

To gain the biggest advantage from exercise, you should use resistance training to acquire muscle. Muscle is the main motor that uses fat for fuel. Even just sitting there, a pound of muscle uses 6 Kcal per day. Compare this to a pound of fat, which will only use 2 Kcal to fuel itself. If you exercise that muscle with resistance training, it will ramp up its usage to about 20 Kcal per day. No matter how hard or long you exercise, fat cells will trundle along at the same rate of fuel usage. Muscle is the main variable you have within your control to modulate your metabolic rate.  

Having said that, 6 Kcal at rest and 20 Kcal, if exercised, per day doesn’t sound a lot, but let’s apply to a real life case. One of my clients has (minus their bodyfat) 170lbs of lean tissue. On average 50% of a males lean body mass is muscle, so he is carrying about 85lbs on his frame.  If we confined him to bed-rest for a day his level of muscle mass would use about 510 Kcal to fuel functions such as maintenance of muscle tone and other housekeeping duties. If we exercised him for about an hour with a resistance training routine his muscles would ramp up their usage to 1,700 Kcal; a difference of 1,200 Kcal. Only 50% of this would come via fat so we’re talking about 66g of additional fat used throughout the day.

Let’s up the ante, say we gain 10lbs of muscle and exercise that muscle daily, we have now caused an additional 200 Kcal hike in our metabolism per day. Over the course of a year, without doing anything else this would be enough to drop anywhere between 10-20lbs of fat.

And, before you throw up the old cliché about not wanting to turn into a bodybuilder, let’s clear that up, it doesn’t happen. Even on an optimum plan of training and nutrition, and if you were under 30, and a beginner, would you stand to put on 10 lbs of muscle in a year. The rest of us, where sometimes life gets in the way of all of the above requirements, would at best be anywhere close to putting on up to 5lbs in a year, and that’s if we have everything dialed in.

Don’t be like Starsky pondering whether you can handle the V8, take Hutch’s advice ‘I’m not your mother’, ’Now Go…….Go’.