Gain Muscle to Lose Fat
The short answer
Muscle burns about 4 to 7 calories per pound per day at rest, compared to roughly 2 calories for a pound of fat. Building muscle raises your basal metabolic rate, so you burn more calories around the clock and a fat-loss deficit becomes far easier to hold than it is with cardio alone.
When most people think about losing weight or shedding fat, their first instinct is often to hit the treadmill or dive into aerobic workouts. But what if the real secret to fat loss is gaining muscle? On this episode of the Garage Gym Athlete Podcast, Jerred Moon breaks down the science and explains why muscle mass is your most powerful tool for burning fat and achieving sustainable results.
The Muscle-Fat Connection
Muscle isn't just about looking good. It's a calorie-burning powerhouse. Each pound of muscle burns approximately 4 to 7 calories per day, even at rest. By contrast, a pound of fat burns only about 2 calories per day. The more muscle mass you have, the higher your basal metabolic rate (BMR), meaning your body burns more calories throughout the day, even while you're sleeping.
This makes muscle mass your built-in calorie burner, helping you create a calorie deficit without extreme dieting or endless cardio.
Why Aerobic Exercise Isn't Enough
While aerobic exercise burns calories during your workout, its effects don't last long. Resistance training, on the other hand, builds muscle, which continues to burn calories 24/7. Think of your muscle mass as a long-term investment, like compound interest for your metabolism. The more muscle you build, the more your body works for you, even during rest.
Real-World Examples
Consider two 200-pound men:
- Man A: 8% body fat (lean and muscular)
- Man B: 30% body fat (obese)
Man A burns approximately 2,179 calories per day at rest, while Man B burns just 1,743 calories. That's a difference of 436 calories daily, without any additional effort. Over a week, that adds up to over 3,000 extra calories burned simply by having more muscle mass.
How to Build Muscle for Fat Loss
To gain muscle and optimize fat loss, focus on these three key principles:
- Time Under Tension (TUT): Slow, controlled movements increase the time your muscles are under strain, promoting growth.
- Volume: Incorporate higher reps and sets to increase workload and stimulate muscle hypertrophy.
- Dynamic Effort: Add explosive movements like plyometrics or sprints to activate fast-twitch muscle fibers, which have a higher growth potential.
These principles can be applied to bodyweight exercises, kettlebell training, or barbell lifts. The goal is to challenge your muscles consistently and progressively.
The Big Picture: Fat Loss Made Easier
When you prioritize building muscle, creating a caloric deficit becomes much easier. Your muscles are constantly working to burn calories, even when you're not actively training. This means you can achieve fat loss without extreme calorie restriction or hours of cardio. Plus, strength training enhances insulin sensitivity, helping your body process glucose more effectively, a critical factor for long-term fat loss.
Start Investing in Muscle
If you're serious about fat loss, shift your focus to gaining muscle. Muscle mass is your metabolic secret weapon, making it easier to burn calories, lose fat, and maintain your progress over time. Start incorporating resistance training into your routine and watch how your body transforms, not just in appearance but in how efficiently it burns energy.
Remember: fat loss isn't just about calories burned during a workout. It's about building a body that burns more calories all day, every day.
Garage Gym Athlete Workout of the Week
Read the full episode transcript
Jerred: Let's talk about how, if you want to lose fat or lose weight, your number one goal should be gaining muscle mass. This is the Garage Gym Athlete Podcast. I'm Jerred Moon. And I feel like a lot of people don't fully understand this concept, so I want to briefly dive into it. When people go to lose weight, they typically go down this aerobic path.
I don't know why, maybe because it's hard and it burns a lot of calories, but that's where most people want to go. They want to say, okay, I don't know what to do, I'll start running. In reality, that's not the best situation. And you can't really think about it just from a calories-burned standpoint of how many calories do I burn in this workout. How you want to start looking at it, from a conceptual basis, is how can I put something in my body, on my body, however you want to put it, that is going to burn calories for me while I sleep. That's what you need to be thinking of. That's the conceptual level.
It's like, okay, to lose weight, to lose body fat, I need to be burning a significant amount of calories. And how do I do that? The best way to burn calories is muscle mass, plain and simple. If you can understand that concept, it will make you want to gain the most muscle that you possibly can, that your frame will allow, that you can do naturally. And it's because on average, each pound of muscle burns about four to seven calories per day just to maintain itself. Now, obviously, disclaimers, these numbers can vary. But four to seven calories per day, and by contrast each pound of fat burns only about two calories per day.
Okay, so two to four is double, two to seven is more than triple. Muscle mass just to maintain itself burns a significant amount of calories. And so what it's going to do is increase your BMR, your basal metabolic rate. So more muscle mass means your body burns more calories at rest. The higher BMR can contribute to a calorie deficit without needing to restrict food intake aggressively.
It's also going to enhance your insulin sensitivity, because increased muscle mass helps improve how your body processes and uses glucose, which can contribute to fat loss over time. I'm a huge believer in that fact. I truly believe glucose and insulin are something that you need to focus on. But here's another way to think about it. We got to the conceptual level, like, okay, I want something in my body to burn calories even while I'm sleeping.
If you want to think about this another way, if we had two people, person one and person two, saving money. Person one saves a thousand dollars a month, person two saves a thousand dollars a month. Person two is just putting it in a savings account. And so if something comes up or whatever, they have to dip into their savings, it just depletes, because it's basically nothing happening. Month one, you have 1,000, you have 2,000. The other person, person one, is like, you know what, I'm going to put this thousand dollars in an investment.
Let's say it's an investment that earns 10%. Well, now they're getting compound interest, right? And so if we play that out over 10 years, person one is going to be so much further along than person two that it's not even funny. So much so that person one could take several months off while person two even doubles the amount they save, and they still will come nowhere close to catching up. Then person one can pick it back up, keep investing, and still just absolutely crush person two.
So I'm not trying to get too far into the financial analogy, but person one, who's investing the money, is the person with muscle mass. You can keep gaining muscle mass, muscle mass, muscle mass, and then you can take a break. You could work out a little bit less. You could go into maintenance mode, you could do all these things, and you still have all this muscle mass that's sitting around just burning four to seven calories per day per pound of muscle just to maintain itself. While the other person is not as focused on that, and maybe they're doing endurance training or maybe they're just gaining fat mass, and it's not really doing anything for them.
They're burning some calories, but it's not the same as having this investment, this true nest egg, that's just starting to build and build on itself. So that's another way that you can think about it. But to get down into the actual numbers of looking at this. So if we had a 200-pound male, and let's say it was a 200-pound male at 8% body fat, and then we also had a 200-pound male that was at 30% body fat, which is obese.
Well, if we just get into the basal metabolic rate, the BMR calculations, the person with 30% body fat just to exist, right, this is just calories burned at rest, that's what BMR is, just to be alive. Really it's like if you were to just wake up in the morning and not move, that's truly what BMR is. So I'm not factoring in any kind of exercise, getting your steps in, anything like that. This is just BMR. So how many calories you've burned at rest. The 200-pound male with 30% body fat is going to burn about 1,700 calories per day, 1,700 just to exist.
And more specifically, if you get into the actual calculations, it's 1,743. Now the 200-pound male at 8% body fat, which is a good body, pretty hard to achieve, but that's a great body fat percentage, this guy's going to burn 2,179 calories per day. So the difference in calorie burn from person one to person two is 436 calories per day. Do you see why it's so much easier for someone who has muscle mass to maintain their fitness?
This is not true of endurance athletes, by the way. Endurance athletes who strength train, yeah. But if you're just purely endurance, this isn't necessarily the same. You have some muscle mass, but not near as much. So you want to be lean, and you want to have a lot of muscle mass too. You don't want to just be, because I mean, there are people at 4% body fat who are just skinny with not very much muscle mass, right? That's not necessarily what I'm talking about. You want to be a lower body fat percentage but high muscle mass. And if you achieve that, you can burn 400 to 500 calories more per day just existing, not to mention what you end up doing in your exercise each and every single day, because strength training, resistance training, burns a lot of calories.
It really and truly does, but that's not what people should be focusing on if they're trying to lose fat, or lose weight, lose body fat. They shouldn't be thinking, which form of exercise burns the most calories? Because I could strap kettlebells to your hands and your feet and put a weight vest on you and put you in a four-foot-deep pool and have you do jumping jacks and walk around, just make it as hard as I possibly can, and say, hey look, I discovered what's going to burn the most possible calories in a workout. That's not really what we should be optimizing for. What we should be optimizing for is how do I have something in or on my body that just sits around and burns calories at a higher rate than anything else.
And that is muscle mass. So that's why you should be focusing on it. That's the whole conceptual part about it. And you do this quite simply. You don't have to do powerlifting, heavy weightlifting, just resistance training of any kind. So you can do hypertrophy. I've talked about on the podcast several times how to focus on hypertrophy. It's time under tension, you need to get volume in there, and then you need to do some dynamic efforts.
So if you could focus on those three things with whatever you're using, whether that's bodyweight, whether that's a kettlebell, whether that's a barbell, if you can get a lot of time under tension, you can get a lot of volume, and then you can also activate type two muscle fibers by doing fast and explosive movements. You can do those three things, you're going to be building muscle mass. And once you've built that muscle mass, you have this bank that's just going to continually burn calories for you. And it's easy for someone who has a lot of muscle mass to go into a calorie deficit. Because if you have a lot of muscle mass and you just forget to eat, or you don't eat as much as you should, it doesn't matter, your muscles are sitting there just burning calories.
So a caloric deficit, which is what you ultimately need to be in to lose fat and to lose body weight, it's just so much easier for someone who has muscle mass, because you're just going to slip into that caloric deficit just by the nature of how your body is formed. So that is what you should start optimizing for. And the reason behind it is not because we're going to burn more calories in this training session. It's because we're going to burn more calories as a human being at rest when we have more muscle mass. So that is how you can optimize for losing fat, by gaining muscle.
Remember, if you don't kill comfort, comfort will kill you.
Frequently asked questions
How many calories does a pound of muscle burn compared to fat?
A pound of muscle burns roughly 4 to 7 calories per day just to maintain itself, while a pound of fat burns only about 2 calories per day. These numbers vary by person, but the takeaway holds: muscle is far more metabolically active than fat.
Is building muscle better than cardio for losing fat?
For sustainable fat loss, yes. Cardio burns calories only while you are moving, but muscle keeps burning calories 24/7 by raising your basal metabolic rate. Building muscle makes it easier to stay in a calorie deficit without living on the treadmill.
How much more does a lean person burn at rest?
Comparing two 200-pound men, the one at 8% body fat burns about 2,179 calories a day at rest, while the one at 30% body fat burns about 1,743. That is roughly 436 more calories per day, or over 3,000 extra calories per week, just from carrying more muscle.
What are the three keys to building muscle for fat loss?
Focus on time under tension (slow, controlled reps), volume (more reps and sets), and dynamic effort (explosive movements like plyometrics or sprints). Hit those three levers consistently with any tool and you will build muscle.
Do I need heavy weights or a barbell to gain muscle?
No. Resistance training of any kind works. You can build muscle with bodyweight movements, kettlebells, or a barbell as long as you apply time under tension, volume, and dynamic effort and progress over time.
Does building muscle help with more than just calorie burn?
Yes. Strength training improves insulin sensitivity, so your body processes and uses glucose more effectively. That supports fat loss over the long term on top of the higher resting calorie burn muscle provides.
Train like an athlete. For life.
Programming built this way: hard when it counts, sustainable the rest of the time.
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