Muscle and Metabolism

Muscle & Metabolism – You’ve heard this before: “Muscles are like the engine of your car. The bigger the engine the more fuel you burn.” True, but overrated. In reality, gaining a pound of muscle will increase daily energy expenditure by 15-25 calories, equivalent to 1/3rd of an apple.
.
Arguably, if you gain 10 pounds of muscle it can lead to a greater caloric expenditure of around 200 cals per day. Still not anywhere close to what people would believe. While adding muscle will increase energy expenditure, it doesn’t justify eating like an ogre.
.
Adding more muscle WILL make it easier to get leaner and harder to gain fat. But burning extra cals isn’t the only reason. It’s also due to an increase in storage room. If you gain 1 pound of muscle you can store an extra 15-20g of glycogen in the muscles. So if you gain 5 pounds of muscle you’ll be able to store 75-100g of glycogen more. You can eat more carbs before storing them as fat – the body will fill up glycogen stores before converting carbs to fat. Mechanically, bigger muscles = more room for glycogen which means I can have more carbs without storing them as fat.
.
That’ll help you keep metabolic rate elevated because the conversion of T4 into T3 is dependent on carb intake and cortisol levels. Higher carbs normally means lower cortisol because the function of cortisol is to mobilize glycogen to elevate blood sugar. There’s less need for that when eating carbs. So, more muscle allows you to eat more carbs which helps keep your metabolic rate humming and also makes you more anabolic via a higher level of insulin and IGF-1.
.
More muscle also = more insulin sensitivity. Good for two reasons: It means you need to produce less insulin to get the job done. If insulin is elevated less, it gets back down quickly. As long as insulin is significantly elevated, fat mobilization is less efficient. So the quicker insulin comes down, the more time you’ll be spending mobilizing fat for fuel.
If your muscles are more insulin sensitive, you’ll be better at storing nutrients in the muscle instead of as body fat.
.
The car engine analogy isn’t terrible, but there’s more to it.
.