Would it to be fair to say that most people have a small amount of muscle surrounded by a large amount of fat within their problem areas? Now what we want to actually do is have a larger amount of muscle surrounded by a smaller amount of fat, therefore giving us toned up look we are after.
Now this is called the power of muscle, for every 1lb of muscle we can put on you or reactivate on your body you will burn an extra 50 calories extra per day. So if we can put 5kg of muscle on you then you will burn an extra 550 calories per day, which sounds awesome.
However, you are probably reading this now, thinking like most people I work with that you would like to burn the extra 550 calories per day – “actually I want to lose weight, I don’t want to gain a stone of muscle and be walking around all muscular, it’s not really the look most people want.”
It doesn’t work like that because 1lb of muscle is about the same size as a large strawberry and 1lb of fat is the size of a large block of butter, so if I said to you now -let’s remove the equivalent fat of 10 blocks of butter from your waist, hips or bum and replace it with 10 large strawberries, you would be over the moon!
You might weigh the same on the scales but your body shape would change considerably which is the key thing. That being said one of my biggest frustrations in the fitness industry is that trainers say to clients that you haven’t lost any weight this week!
You must have gained muscle.... Heard that before? It’s actually a copout, the reason being is that it’s really hard to gain muscle, even the top natural bodybuilders in the world will only gain around 8-10lbs of muscle per year. You are never going to realistically exercise to the intensity of a body builder and start to gain muscle. So if anybody says to you that you haven’t lost weight because you have gained muscle, it’s a copout.
The key thing to getting the extra calorific burn is something called muscle activation. Let me explain this to you. Let’s say for example you have 20lbs of muscle in your legs but due to what you currently do on a daily basis, you probably aren’t using all of that muscle. You are probably only using a portion of that and let’s say as an example that you are only using 2lbs of it.
If you are only using 2lbs active then you will only burn 100 calories per day because every 1lb of active muscle you have you will burn 50 calories, so 2lbs = 100calories.
Our job with the exercise is to start to activate as much of that muscle as we can. For example, if over a period of time we can activate all 20lbs of the muscle you will burn 1000 calories per day.
Now you already have this muscle on you in terms of weight, you just need to get it active and working for you because the more active muscle you have, the more calories you will burn at rest and therefore the more fat you are going to burn on a daily basis.