Fueling the Fat Burn…Your Metabolism (Part 2)

We helped you to re-think cardio and weight training as it relates to fueling your metabolism and fat loss.

Today we’re going to take a closer look at metabolism to more fully understand how this piece fuels fat loss.  Over the next two blog posts we’ll be looking at how the performance of strength training affects fat loss and then we’ll take a look at what you do outside the gym, including what you eat can affect your fat loss capacity.

What is metabolism?

Our metabolism is, quite simply, how many calories we burn in a typical day.  It is affected and controlled by our thyroid and largely a factor of our muscle mass.  So you can see where the start of the relationship between strength training and metabolism occurs.

To develop this relationship further, every pound of muscle you put on requires additional calories per day to be burned just to maintain that muscle!  Aerobic work does not necessarily maintain muscle and can lower resting metabolic rate, which is the largest percentage of total metabolism (about 60-70%).

Can you see where the lies are starting to come forward?!  Therefore, the more muscle you carry (gained through strength training), the higher the resting metabolic rate, meaning the more fat to be burned.

Let’s go over this one more time:

The more muscle you carry, the higher your resting metabolic rate, the more fat you’ll burn.  Get strong!

Stay tuned to the blog for our continued conversation on fat loss.

Image Credit via Flickr.