Calories burned/lbs of Muscle

[Gradstudent78]

Hi, quick question, can someone tell me how many calories are burned per lbs of muscle, thanks.
-Grad

Edit to clarify: Holding everything thing else equal, if you added 1 lbs of muscle, how much would it increase your caloric expenditure. I'm asking purely out of scientific interests. I know its not 50 Kcal/lbs, which is often what you see quoted in popular literature.

[Lost Dog]

There's no simple answer. How many calories you burn also depends on how much fat you have and your metabolic rate.

Perhaps, if you elaborate a bit on the reasoning behind the question?

[John Izzo]

If I remember from exercise phys class.....8 years ago...I believe the number shot out was 7-9 calaories per pound of muscle. I haven't seen research to support this (and I haven't really looked for it), but this can give you something to google.

[bipennate]

From Christian Finn's website:

http://www.thefactsaboutfitness.com/news/cals.htm

[NeilC]

I think it's pretty clear that resting muscle doesn't burn many cals, certainly not more than many other types of tissue.

I assume that bigger muscles lifting heavier weights will burn a lot more calories than smaller ones lifting lighter weights, for the same time period? Otherwise you have to start wondering why these big strength guys need to eat so much.,

[Lisa~]

Bip, that's a good link. Thanks for posting that one.

Gradstudent78, if you're looking for something more scientific then these links might be helpful. But Christian Finn gives several references too, so make note of those as well.

Check out the study at this link:
Training for Weight Management to show how increased fat-free mass (lean muscle) increases RMR. However, note that the increase is very slight (5 -6%).

Also look at:
INFLUENCE OF EXERCISE AND DIET ON METABOLIC RATE

Lisa

[karky]

ive read something that 1 lbs of lean muscle burns 40 something cals per day... but dont quote me on thatone as i dont know how reliable my source was.

[Lisa~]

Originally Posted by karky

ive read something that 1 lbs of lean muscle burns 40 something cals per day... but dont quote me on thatone as i dont know how reliable my source was.

Your source was unreliable. I think we've already covered that from the first post onward.

[Adam Campbell]

Eric Poehlman told me directly that based on all of his reserach, it's about 10-13 kcal/lb of muscle. (At the time, he was probably the leading metabolism researcher in the country, but then he was involved in a research fraud scandal. Not sure what happened to him, but I do trust his data on this.)

edit: I guess I do know what happened to him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Poehlman

[Lisa~]

Originally Posted by Adam Campbell

Eric Poehlman told me directly that based on all of his reserach, it's about 10-13 kcal/lb of muscle. (At the time, he was probably the leading metabolism researcher in the country, but then he was involved in a research fraud scandal. Not sure what happened to him, but I do trust his data on this.)

edit: I guess I do know what happened to him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Poehlman

That seond link I put up was one of Poehlman's studies if Gradstudent78 needs the source.

[Gradstudent78]

Thank you everyone for the responses, especially everyone that provided links that will allow me to get some followup information.
-Grad

[Craig]

50 calories per pound of muscle is one of the biggest myths. Trainers should be stripped of their certication if they ever say this.

CB

[Lisa~]

Craig, that might be a bit severe as a punishment!

We all live and learn. I would like to see changes made to all new articles that are printed and possibly a recant if someone has used this misinformation in the past. Would that be enough?

I was very frustrated to see this from one of my favorite fitness experts:

To break it down further - every pound of muscle you put on requires approximately 50 calories per day to maintain. This doesn't take into account the calories burned in training to develop that muscle, or the calories burned in training to keep that muscle - these 50 calories are just the amount needed by that muscle to just sit there.

Lisa

[Craig]

It sounds so good when you think about it in terms of 1 pound of muscle...

But then what about the guy that puts on 20 pounds of muscle.

Does his metabolism go up 1000 calories?

If it did, how the heck could he keep that muscle mass on? He'd have to increase his calorie intake by 1000 per day just for maintenance.

That's when you see how inaccurate the statement is...

The big picture approach is the best approach,

CB

[Lou Schuler]

I was very frustrated to see this from one of my favorite fitness experts:

Quote:
To break it down further - every pound of muscle you put on requires approximately 50 calories per day to maintain. This doesn't take into account the calories burned in training to develop that muscle, or the calories burned in training to keep that muscle - these 50 calories are just the amount needed by that muscle to just sit there.

That's from Alwyn's site. I suspect he wrote it several years ago, when all of us used to repeat some variation on that theme.

Hell, when I saw that passage in your post, I went back through TAP to make sure I hadn't written it.

TAP does make that claim in at least one place -- I found it on page 17 just now -- but I have an excuse: We started writing that book in the summer of 2000, and finished it in the spring of 2001.

Since then, I've tried not to use that claim, and in fact specifically refute it in NROL (page 83), apologizing to readers for helping to popularize the 50-calorie myth in the first place.

The problem, as I discover anew every now and then, is that it doesn't matter if I no longer believe something I wrote between five and six years ago. The fact I wrote it back then gives it a life of its own.

I don't own the copyright to anything I wrote for my former employer, so the company is free to use everything I wrote between 1998 and 2004 in any way it chooses. Sometimes it appears under my byline, but sometimes it just pops up in the middle of someone else's work.

I won't go into details about the many surprising places I've found my words reprinted without attribution. But I will say my words were a lot more profitable after I left the company than than they were when I actually wrote them ... and they weren't exactly loss-leaders in their original formats.

[Gradstudent78]

I think where all this started, which is part of the reasons I asked is that I saw it reported in a book I was just reading as 1 lbs of muscle burns 50 kj/kg per day. I did the math and it came out to about 5.4 Kcalories/lbs (assuming I did my math right). I'm guessing someone read it wrong, substituted units and these things just kind of spread. It is a good reason to go back to the original source material in the literature rather then just believing what people have rehashed over and over again. Thanks again all.
--Grad

[Alwyn]

That article was written quite a while ago -- (I just edited it!). I don't usually like to go back and change what I wrote in the past because a) I'd rather just write a new article and b) I'm not embarrassed that I have continued to learn.

The 50 cals per lb was "common knowledge" at one point (for a long time) and I'm not concerned that I believed it. Truth is we all did. For years.

What's really interesting is if you read some of the articles I wrote back in 95-96 when I was first appearing in magazines. Ha!

Let's just say I make no apologies for continuing to learn. And it's fair to say that I fully expect that 5 years from now I'll be cringing at some of the stuff we wrote in NROL.

But I think the amount of calories burned to gain, and maintain one pound of muscle ends up IN REALITY being higher than 10-14 calories anyway.

The research is a little grey as regards an actual number in my opinion -- because it's hard to say how many calories a pound of muscle burns up just sitting there -because it eventually will go away if you don't do something. Muscle just sitting there isn't going to sit there for too much longer. So it's a pointless number.

The whole point of adding the extra muscle is that it requires work (calories) to get it, requires work just sitting there and requires work to keep it (training + EPOC). So adding and keeping 5lbs of muscle requires calories.

I think the point that gets lost in these discussions is that muscle mass is a good thing and it's calorically active (and about twice as active as the same fat mass). So the message is still - try to get/keep as much muscle as possible and make it work.


AC

[Lisa~]

I totally respect you for chiming in on this post and agree with everything you said here. And you're still one of my favorite fitness experts.

Lisa