You’re Just Five Pounds of Muscle Away from a Faster Metabolism

One Way to Boost Your Metabolism – Add Five Pounds of Muscle

We talk a LOT about metabolism at Couture Coaching. The primary goal of our 1:1 coaching program is to help women achieve a faster metabolism and a body they love. We want women to love their bodies but also love their lives and not feel like they are constantly restricting food. If you want to do these two things simultaneously, your metabolism MUST be in a good place.

When we refer to the term metabolism, we are not using the medical definition, which is the chemical changes that take place in a cell or an organism. We are referring to your daily energy expenditure - aka, how many calories you burn. This is how most people define metabolism in everyday conversation.

How to Speed Up Your Metabolism

We have an entire article dedicated to what you can do to speed up your metabolism, particularly if you are over the age of 30 or 40. One of the key components to naturally increasing your metabolism is having muscle on your frame. Adding even just five pounds of muscle will make it much easier to maintain your weight (or more importantly, your body size and a healthy bodyfat percentage).

How Many Calories Does a Pound of Muscle Burn?

Research differs as to how many calories pound of muscle actually burns. I have found research that says a pound of muscle can burn anywhere between 6 – 30 calories per day. I suspect it may lie somewhere in the middle, but we will be extra conservative in the examples I use to illustrate just how helpful having an extra five pounds of muscle on your body can be. We will go with the six calories per day number. If that is the case, on the conservative side adding five pounds of muscle will burn an additional 30 calories per day. Not a lot. However, if you add that up over an entire month, that is about 900 calories per month. Over the course of a year, that is nearly 11,000 calories. But do the math: this translates into three to four pounds of fat you would NOT gain during the course of that year simply by having five additional pounds of muscle on your frame. Over a decade, this could mean avoiding 30-40 pounds of fat gain. All simply because you added five pounds of muscle to your frame.

The Act of Strength Training Allows Muscle to Burn More Calories

While simply having an extra five pounds of muscle will allow you to burn more calories per day, the act of adding and maintaining muscle mass burns calories, too. Most types of resistance exercise will accelerate protein turnover (an increase in the rate of protein synthesis and breakdown), which is going to increase calorie expenditure in the hours (and, in some cases, days) after exercise.

And there are studies to show that the more muscle you have, the more calories you’ll burn after an intense workout.

When exercise ends, it takes time for everything to get back to normal. Depleted glucose and fat stores need to be refilled. Damaged muscle cells need to be repaired. All of this requires energy.

And the more rebuilding that has to be done, the more calories are being burned after your workout is over. Or to put it another way, recovering muscle has a much greater energy requirement than resting muscle.

So that thirty pounds of fat we would NOT gain by adding muscle could be very under-stated.

Benefits of Having a Fast Metabolism

When your metabolism is healthy, you tend to feel well and your body should function (for the most part) as it is supposed to. Your sleep will improve, you’ll have energy throughout the day, and your menstrual cycle should be regular. What’s better — you can enjoy vacations and celebrate holidays without fear of gaining ten pounds.

Many women say they would love to have a “fast” metabolism. In their minds, people with a healthy metabolism can eat whatever they want and not gain weight. In reality, very few people actually have this luxury. Those we perceive as having a “fast” metabolism are likely just making lifestyle choices that allow their body to burn more calories day in and day out. One of the biggest factors in your energy expenditure (aka metabolism) is your dieting history. If you have a history of yo-yo dieting or chronically eating low calories, you have likely downregulated your metabolism. Possibly even very significantly. We discuss this in detail here .

Adding Five Pounds of Muscle Will Make You Look Better Than Losing Five Pounds of Fat

This is hard for most women to believe, but it’s almost always true. Looking at this purely from a vanity standpoint, most women would look better by gaining five pounds of muscle than they would from losing five pounds of fat. Muscle is what gives us our shape and curves in the “right” places. Adding muscle to your frame (even if you do not lose any fat) will change the shape of your body, improve posture, and give you a healthier look. Moreover, if you do decide to focus on losing fat after you gain that five pounds of muscle, you will look much better afterwards than if you had decided to tackle the five pounds of fat loss first.

Finally, focusing on adding five pounds of muscle first will actually help those five pounds of fat come off easier. Not only will you burn a few more calories per day just from HAVING that muscle, you will also burn more calories in the process of creating that muscle. Just going through the process of building muscle (which I’ll discuss below) will give your metabolism a boost.

How to Add Five Pounds of Muscle to Boost Your Metabolism

Hopefully by now you are on board with adding five pounds of muscle. But how do you actually do it? And how can you measure this? First, let’s discuss the measurement piece. The most accurate way to tell if you are adding muscle to your body is by getting a DEXA scan or something like a bod pod reading. These methods may be expensive and time consuming, however. If you want a fairly accurate and cheap/easy way to measure your bodyfat, you can look to your local gyms and supplement stores to see if they have a body scan machine. These typically look like a scale with handles. While they may not be 100% accurate, they should be accurate enough to show you trends over time.

Now, how do you actually build this muscle? It comes down to doing a few simple things – strength training two to three times per week, eating enough calories, and eating enough protein. The strength training needs to be a solid program that hits all major muscle groups (think glutes, back, shoulders, legs, etc.), and focuses on progressive overload (lifting heavier/more over time). Determining if you are eating “enough” is a bit more nuanced. This varies from person to person and is greatly impacted by your dieting history (hint – the more you have cut calories in your life time, the harder it will be for you to maintain your weight on higher calories). However, most females should be eating anywhere from 1800-2200+ calories. Anything less than that is likely not enough for you to build muscle. And it’s certainly not enough to have what we would consider to be a “healthy” or “fast” metabolism. Finally, while protein needs will also vary from person to person, a general rule of thumb most females can shoot for (especially if they were not tracking their protein intake) is to aim for 100g per day.

What if I Just Want to Lose Weight?

Even if your goal is weight loss, you would be much better served focusing on gaining 5lbs of muscle first. This article should be enough to get you started, but if you want more guidance in the process, see how you can work with us below.

Let us help you boost your metabolism! Book a free, 15-minute strategy call where we’ll discuss your goals and dieting history and discuss how Couture Coaching can help develop a customized plan for boosting your metabolism that allows you to eat more (really!). We’ll also talk about how you can exercise to build calorie-burning muscle. The Couture Coaching Team wants to help you create a body you love—for life!

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