Muscle Burns Fat

My first attempt at losing fat involved doing endless running on the treadmill and eating a low-fat diet.

Needless to say, this attempt failed.

I would work my ass off only to see a 2-3 pound weight loss in 1 month.

I would then lose motivation, give up and re-gain all the lost weight in a few days.

This happened about 3 times, and then I eventually just gave up on transforming my body.

That was until I came across as fat-to-fit transformation on the bodybuilding.com forums.

I saw a guy called Justin Robbins make a huge fat-to-fit transformation where he lost 65 pounds in 2 years, and I noticed that while losing the weight he gained a lot of muscle mass.

This led me to study bodybuilding for hours each day, and one thing I learned was that muscle burns fat.

In this article I will explain how this works.

How Muscle Burns Fat

When you have more muscle mass, your metabolism increases.

This means that you burn more calories at rest.

When you burn more calories at rest, it’s much easier to achieve a caloric deficit and thereby lose fat.

Besides that, muscle mass “tightens” up your physique.

The more muscle mass you have, the better you will look (as long as you build it in the right places).

Having a lot of muscle mass enables you to carry more fat while still looking good.

For example, if I had a small amount of muscle mass, I would look skinny-fat now.

However, since I’ve gained 40 pounds of muscle mass all over my body since starting my training in 2010, I’m able to put on some fat around my waist and still look good because I have big shoulders, upper chest, arms and ab muscles.

Right now, I’m about 205 pounds and I carry 14% body-fat.

This means that I have 28.7 pounds of fat around my body (almost all of it is around my lower waist, hips and thighs).

Now, consider if I hadn’t gained that 40 pounds of muscle mass since I started training.

In that case, I would be 165 pounds of skinny-fat at almost 17% body-fat instead of 205 pounds at 14% body-fat.

It’s a massive difference.

The lighter you are, the less body-fat you can get away with while still looking good.

Gaining Muscle Mass Takes A Long Time

Here are some numbers taken from my article “How Much Muscle Can You Gain In 1 Year”:

• 1st year of proper training: 20-25 pounds (2 pounds per month)
• 2nd year of proper training: 10-12 pounds (1 pound per month)
• 3rd year of proper training: 5-6 pounds (0.5 pounds per month).
• 4th year of proper training and onwards: 2-3 pounds (not worth calculating)

Now, if you look at the monthly numbers, that’s not a whole lot of muscle, so the conclusion is that you should start building muscle mass as early as possible.

By doing so, you set yourself up for massive success in your training career:

• You will look better if you add the muscle mass in the right places.
• You will be able to carry more fat while still looking good.
• You will burn more fat at rest so you can eat more food while staying lean.

Start Gaining Muscle Mass Now

The strategy I use to help my skinny-fat clients build muscle mass is to first have them master basic bodyweight exercises.

Once they can do 15 perfect form pull ups, we move on to a bodybuilding program which follows Serge Nubret’s Pump Training principles.

I’ve used this approach with massive success for my private coaching clients, and just got a message now from a client from the UK who achieved 15 pull ups:

Be proud but stay hungry,

Oskar Faarkrog