Most of us work extremely hard to loose weight, struggle to maintain, or more often than not just keep gaining. Poor food quality and sedentary working lifestyles are partly to blame.

With weight gain comes extra stored fat. Reducing and burning excess fat in our bodies can be quite a challenge. It takes a lot of hard work and consistency to loose just a few pounds and rid your body of stored fat. In order to boost that fat burning process you must consider:

  • cardio exercise
  • proper diet and nutrition
  • building muscle

By far one of my favorites ways to burn fat is by building muscle. How will building muscle help you loose fat?

First, muscle burns more calories than fat. The body requires more energy to maintain muscle, therefore burns more overall calories. If you increase the amount of muscle in your body, you increase your resting metabolic heart rate increasing the amount of calories you burn at rest as well as during exercise and activities. These increases can potentially help your body burn more overall calories on a daily basis. That extra calorie burn will help assist in overall fat loss. The goal is to build more lean muscle while ridding the body of stored fat.

Second, lets face it… how are you going to build that muscle? Building muscle requires exercise and exercise burns even more calories. Exercise will require the muscles to work harder, increasing the total amount of calories you burn. The extra calories you burn during your workout will help to convert fat into energy and that means fat loss.

As you can see building muscle will boost your metabolism and get you exercising, both of which encourages the burning of extra calories. Those extra calories lead to the break down of fat cells.

Does this mean that it is the only thing you need to do to burn fat? No. However, it will give your body an added boost to help the process along. You absolutely must incorporate cardiovascular exercise for heart health and more calorie burning along with a proper diet and nutrition plan.

Incorporating muscle building and not just cardio and nutrition alone will give you better results in your fat loss goals. It creates a more efficient metabolic body that will have you looking lean and strong!