They physical fitness industry is obsessed with the concept of building new muscle as way to get your metabolism moving faster and to aid losing weight. Both sexes are being told regularly that the more muscle you have on your body, the more calories you will burn which means you will lose much more weight. Is there any truth to this statement? And is muscle really the ultimate fat burner that can help you lose weight without any additional effort?



There have been countless studies to find out how many calories were burt up for every pound of muscle on the body. These studies have concluded that roughly 30 to 50 additional calories were burnt up for every pound of muscle that was being added to the body. So now that we know that this fact has been clearly confirmed, we should now find out how long it would take us to build or grow an additional pound of muscle?

For the average man, it takes around one month, but for women, it often can take twice as long or even longer. If your not going to use supplements of any kind when building muscle, remember that it can be a slow process of repeating the tearing and then rebuilding of your muscles. If you want extra muscle to aid you in weight loss, the process of tearing and repairing is the only effective way to see good results with your workouts over time.

If you are planning to do a little bodybuilding for extra fat burner muscle, there are lots of tried and tested methods to do just that. In the end, it doesn't matter too much which bodybuilding plan you choose as there are always certain vital actions that need to happen if you want to increase the growth of your muscles and also reduce any pain that is very common when tearing your muscles heavily.

When working out any muscle by using weights or resistance, you will find that you get to a point where your muscle is unable to continue lifting and will become completely weak. This is known as the "Point of Failure". When you push a muscle up to this point, it starts to get little rips from within. These little rips start to rebuild when there's protein available, generally over the next 48 hours of recovering which will leave you with a small gain in new muscle tissue. It's this added muscle that ends up getting rid of all those excess fat calories.

One of the keys to bodybuilding with the least amount of pain is by stretching properly. After tearing a muscle, a chemical known as lactic acid enters the area and the healing process will begin. Lactic acid is what causes the pain in your muscles after exercise and workouts. Stretching will help to disperse the lactic acid buildup and reduce the dreaded "day after" pains that are usually felt after a good workout.

It's a good idea, at least if you are just beginning, not to perform weight training every day. At most, you should have a one day on and one day off strategy in place so you can allow yourself the 48 recovery period. You can always engage in other fitness activities or dieting on your off days to burn stored calories. Some muscle groups, however, recover and heal much faster than most of the others and an example are your adbominal muscles, which you are able to workout daily.

When you start weight lifting for the result of growing muscle, it is vital to start consuming a quality source of protein as this is what your muscles are mostly made from. So just how much protein will you need to eat if you begin weight training? If you plan to exercise regularly and vigorously, you should increase your protein intake slighly above the RDA's recommended amount of 0.8 g/kg to 1.2-1.8 g/kg.

So just how many calories can all of this extra muscle burn? If you were to add say, one pound of new muscle, you would end up burning roughly an extra 1500 calories each month and that's without doing any additional dieting or exercise. If you were to gain an additional 10 pounds of new muscle from a continued workout program, you would burn an extra fifteen thousand calories each and every month that would end up accounting for a lot of extra fat loss.