The Key To Your Body Goals: No Matter What They May Be.

Michael Gregory
Sep 5, 2018 · 8 min read

This article was inspired by an article by Dean Somerset on the same topic. I broke it down into a more idiot-proof way that my caveman brain can understand and in a way that makes it obvious how this can help achieve all of your body goals.

BOTTOM LINE: If fat loss is your goal you should be lifting weights not suffering through cardio.

Why Words Matter: You Want To Lose Fat NOT Weight

Let’s get one thing straight first. You want to lose fat. You don’t want to lose weight. Those muscles that you currently have make you look strong, sexy, defined, and capable. With less body fat they would make you even more so of all the aforementioned. With a little more muscle and a little less fat, you would double your returns in the sexy department.

When you lose weight, like when one contracts a life-threatening illness or goes on any number of ill-conceived crash diets1, you look bad and you are hurting your body.

Ladies: You look 1,000 times better at a 150 lbs with muscle than you do at 110 lbs and emaciated.

The runway model look is no longer the standard of beauty,

The fitness and Instagram model has taken that esteemed position.

Men: You want to look formidable and capable. It is not necessary to get “skinny” before you put muscle on.

Age is just a number. You are never too old to get started either.

In fact, they are one in the same thing. Getting lean and putting on muscle are actually complimentary things. I’m going to show you why now.

How Do We Lose Fat?

Forget everything you think you know about losing fat. I’m going to sum it up into one simple sentence that has about 1,875,732 different interpretations and nuances.

“Burn more energy than you take in.”

That’s it.

The rest of this article is going to tell you exactly what the most efficient way of burning more energy2 is.

LET ME BE CLEAR: The following discussion is not the only way to burn fat and maintain muscle; it is merely the most efficient and least labor-intensive of the numerous methods available3.

How Can We Burn Energy?

There are 3 main ways that the body burns energy AKA there are 3 factors that contribute to Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE):

1.Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR)– This is the amount of energy your body burns in order to survive. In other words, it is the amount of energy your body would burn if you laid in bed completely motionless and did nothing but breathe.

  • RESTING METABOLIC RATE ACCOUNTS FOR ~60–75% OF ALL ENERGY BURNED BY YOUR BODY.
  • Yes, 75%. This is the vast majority of all energy burned by your body. You’ll see why this is relevant shortly.

2. Thermic Effect of Physical Activity (TEPA)– This is the amount of energy you burn from exercise and non-exercise movement.

  • YOUR DAILY MOVEMENT ACCOUNTS FOR ~15–30% OF ALL ENERGY BURNED BY YOUR BODY.
  • Even in the best case scenario, this is still half as much energy burned as RMR4.

3. Dietary Induced Thermogenesis (DIT)5 This is the amount of energy your body burns from digesting all of the food you stuff in your face.

  • THE ENERGY BURNED TO DIGEST YOUR FOOD IS ~10% OF ALL ENERGY BURNED.
  • This is the one area of energy burned where you can have a net positive effect. YES! That’s right! If you eat too much The amount of energy you burn can have a positive6 effect on your body. Meaning, you get fat!
Components of TDEE

RMR (Resting Metabolic Rate): The Most Bang For Your Buck.

Without knowing anything about the human body, which of the 3 ways that our bodies burn energy seems like the one that we should spend the most of our effort manipulating…?

Resting Metabolic Rate

It is 75% of TDEE 7. By figuring out how to manipulate it we should have the largest impact on total energy burned and in turn achieve more fat loss.

As it turns out, protein synthesis8 accounts for ~20% of all RMR9.

Components of RMR

AND

50–75% of all the body’s proteins are located in the muscles of the body.

Where Proteins are Located In The Body

Furthermore,

Skeletal muscle10 is anywhere from 36–45% of total body mass.

What Your Body Is Composed Of

The most direct way that we can affect our Resting Metabolic Rate is by causing as much protein synthesis as possible.

Resistance Training To The Rescue

The most surefire way to cause protein synthesis is by lifting.

When we lift weights, or experience resistance training11 we are causing damage to our body that requires repair.

The more resistance you experience the more muscle damage you are causing.

This is how you affect your RMR12.

So Bigger Muscles Means More Energy Burned?

Well yes, but that is not where the benefit stops, or really even begins. Check out this math:

Muscle tissue has a RMR 13 of 4.7–7.0 calories per pound of body mass per day.→

That means, the human body requires 12–20 lbs of muscle to increase your TDEE 14 by 100 calories.

12–20 lbs of muscle gained takes years to achieve if you are anything but a rank novice in the gym. In addition, you can eat 100 calories by accident faster than you can tie your shoes15.

The real benefit of having larger muscles comes in having to repair them…

Think of your body as an architectural structure, not unlike The Washington Monument16.

  1. There was an initial cost of building the monument. Think of that like your journey into adulthood. You required a large amount of energy to grow into your current adult form.
  2. Once finished the Washington Monument is relatively stable, it only requires small repairs and general maintenance to upkeep it. This is you in adulthood, you only require enough protein synthesis to maintain the normal wear and tear of being a human person.
  3. Over time, The monument needs major repairs and a large influx of “energy” in the form of money from all the stress it has undergone, like weather damage, earthquakes, and overweight tourists cracking the foundation. Those stressors are the same thing that happens to your body when you resistance train.

In both instances, the more stressors your body or the Washington Monument experience the more energy17 or money18 will be required to rebuild.

Where the human body veers from its brick and mortar equivalent is that every time our bodies get repaired we are rebuilt bigger and stronger so that we can better handle future stressors.

This way in the future our body will require a greater stressor to produce an equivalent level of damage19.

What About Cardio?

I knew you were going to ask that, it’s like I can read your mind….So, here we go.

Cardio is short for cardiovascular tomfoolery20.

The primary purpose of cardio is to work your cardiovascular system. NOT your skeletal muscles. In fact, properly conducted steady state cardio will make an effort to use your skeletal muscle as sparingly as possible.

This is why runners are so skinny. Their bodies are as efficient as possible21, the more often you “train cardio”22 the more efficient your body becomes at it by perfecting form and shedding unnecessary muscle.

This is why running a mile at your current weight burns fewer calories than it did when you were obese and had terrible running form. A good runner employs whatever the opposite of progressive overload is……Regressive Underload?

Not only that but cardio has the tendency to indiscriminately shed weight from both your fat stores and your muscle stores. This is classic biological efficiency that does the exact opposite of what we would want it to do in an ideal situation.

The above scenario has primary and secondary detrimental effects:

  1. Cardio forces you to lose hard earned muscle and potentially maintain that unwanted fat.
  2. With less muscle, your RMR actually goes down permanently.

Not only are you burning fewer calories while running than you used to but you are burning fewer calories in general because you have less muscle mass. If you neglect to compensate for this change in RMR23 in your diet cardio can potentially cause you to actually GAIN FAT.

Basically, unless you are competing in something that requires you to be good at running there is nothing good that can come from it24.

What About Just Upping Workout Intensity?

Remember TEPA25 is only 15–30% of TDEE26. For us normal people, not working out multiple hours a day, it’s probably closer to that 15%27.

What’s more is that Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT), for many people, actually outperforms Exercise on average when it comes to total energy burned.

The more “working out” you do that isn’t directly helping you increase muscle mass the more likely you are diminishing your overall muscle. Meaning, it potentially has the negative effect of lowering your RMR28.

Lastly, and maybe most importantly, performing more cardio is not progressively inducing stress on your skeletal muscle29. The after effect of a taxing cardio workout is the opposite of what it could be on your RMR30 as it is with a resistance training session.

Okay, But What About Dietary Intervention?

If by dietary intervention you mean manipulating DIT31 you are definitely onto something.

However, that is outside the scope of this article. I will be getting to it in another article. The main distinction is that this article is about manipulating the exhaustion of calories. The main way to use DIT to your advantage is by manipulation of the consumption of calories AKA what and how you eat32.

Inputs and Outputs

As far as outputs are concerned the most efficient and least detrimental way to increase the amount of energy you burn in order to facilitate fat loss is by resistance training.

The alternative, cardio, is not only less time efficient but also comes with the negative side effect. It indiscriminately targets muscle as well as fat in its purge towards efficiency.

Get in the gym and move heavy things regardless of who you are33.

Originally published at www.composurefitness.com on September 5, 2018.

Michael Gregory

Written by

Michael is the founder of Composure Fitness and a former U.S. Marine Corps Captain. He’s either in Bali or Philly weather pending. Writing nutrition, fitness….

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