The biggest bang for your buck

Photo by Sven MiekeUnsplash

We learned last week that the largest percentage of Calories that you burn in a given day come from metabolic, cellular-level processes. Today we are going to look at how we can take advantage of that in order to get the most Caloric burn for our efforts.

First, we should take a look at some foundational principles of how the human body works. I will try not to got too overly technical, but there are some things that will need explanation in order for everything to make sense.

The first thing we need to note about the human body is that it likes to keep everything more or less stable. The term for this is homeostasis. As an example, if your body temperature starts to rise, the body prefers to keep the temperature the same, so it will do things to mitigate the increase in temperature by sweating or "encouraging" you to seek a nice, cold drink of water or some way to bring your temperature down. Conversely, if your body temperature drops, you shiver in order to create heat.

Whenever you exercise, the type of exercise you do will determine how your body reacts to it. For our example today, we are going to look at lifting heavy weights, usually with various barbell movements such as the squat, deadlift, press, bench press and that sort of thing. You may recall that we already discussed the stress --> recovery --> adaptation cycle. In our example, lifting heavy weights is the "stress" aspect of that cycle.

When lifting heavy weights properly, what you are doing is placing the body in a situation in which you are exposing it to a stimulus that it is not accustomed to...that is...lifting heavy weight. Because the body is not accustomed to this, the effort to lift said weight can create  microscopic damage to the muscle fibers. As an aside, there is some thought that this is what can account for that muscle soreness you can get the following day, but that is still the subject of some debate.

Now that you have stressed the body and created those little tears in your muscle, the body will need to move into the recovery phase. Remember that the cellular, metabolic tasks performed by the body account for about 60% of your daily Calorie burn. Repairing damaged muscle tissue falls neatly into the category of "cellular, metabolic tasks." Therefore, you burn a lot of Calories by allowing your body to perform these repairs. 

Not only do you get the benefits of the energy it takes to repair the damaged muscle tissues from lifting heavy, there is another benefit to this as well. That is, the adaptation phase of our cycle. Because you have exposed your body to a stimulus of heavier weight than what it has had to lift in the past, the body will attempt to compensate for this stimulus by increasing your ability to lift that weight in the future. In other words, you body wasn't used to lifting that, but you forced it to lift that, so now the body will adapt to be able to lift that.

Again, this process is a cellular-level process that requires synthesizing proteins to build more muscle on top of repairing the damage to the existing muscle. Not only does the process of building new muscle add to your Calorie burn, but from a Caloric standpoint, muscle tissue is more "expensive" to maintain than tissues such as bone, skin, fatty tissue, etc. Therefore, by adding muscle you are essentially increasing the amount of Calories your body burns every day simply by virtue of the muscle tissue existing.

While it is a bit out of scope for today to go there, it should at least be pointed out that, in addition to Calorie usage, there are a number of other benefits available that result from building strength and lean muscle mass. There are studies that correlate lean muscle mass with longevity, overall health, aesthetic satisfaction and just the fact that anything that you can do, you can do it just as well or better if you are stronger.

Hopefully, you will find this helpful and useful information so that you can take this info and use it to get you to your fitness goals...whether they be about losing fat, bulking up, or just getting generally stronger. Feel free to leave any questions or comments below. I understand that this goes strongly against "conventional wisdom" that I have seen around gyms and in magazines and blogs and such, so discussion can be very helpful.