If I work on building muscle, do I need to focus on weight loss to burn fat or will it the fat take care of itself?

Very interesting point this is. Will building muscle alone take care of the fat burning for you?

Back in the traditional days of fat loss, everybody thought that losing excess body fat meant doing 30 minutes to 1 hour cardio, 3–4 days per week. Unfortunately, this leads to less than ideal results, because most people lose muscle mass as well as fat. Your metabolism drops, and you burn even less calories per day. The end result is increase body fat levels in the long run, despite the endless cardio and food restrictions.

Training with weights is essential to both strength building and fat burning. Here are a few reasons why:-

1. When you build muscle, you increase your resting metabolism
2. Increase in the rate of your body’s ability to burn fat
3. Increasing your metabolic rate on a daily basis

The basic terms of weight loss involves energy balance. You need to burn more calories than you take through food. Calories burnt are made up of the following units.

• Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR) is the calories your body burns at rest (if you did not do any activities)
• Active Energy Expenditure (AEE) ist he calories you burn during exercise
• Non- Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT) the calories you burn from all the activities other than exercise over the course of your day.

The most important point I want to highlight is that aerobic exercise (cardio) has the power to increase energy expenditure more than weight training duet o the fact that weight training is intermittent, including rest periods. HOWEVER, weight training substantially increases the other two factors RMR & NEAT, so that you burn more total calories over the course of the day, every day! (please remember this, especially women!)

Weight training will increase your metabolic rate

Building muscle is the key to increasing your metabolism. Muscle mass contributes to 22% of RMR. Weight training can preserve muscle mass when cutting calories to lose fat. On low calorie diets that didn’t include exercise, body fat is lost but muscle mass is also wasted leading to a radical drop in daily calorie burn.

Weight training increases catecholamine hormone level

Intensive exercise increases baseline levels of the following hormones; catecholamine, epinephrine and norepinephrine. These hormones increase carb and fat burning, which raises metabolic rate.

Weight training raises resting metabolic rate when in recovery

Intense exercise such as high-intensity weight training, leads to an accelerate rate of fat burning during the 24 hours post exercise.

Weight training increases fat burning

As the body works to synthesize and store glycogen, fat burning is elevated. In addition, post-workout elevations in hormones, such as catecholamines and growth hormone also contribute to greater use of fat for fuel. These two factors boost post-workout fat burn by 93 percent following moderate-intensity training.

In summary

• Weight training raises metabolic rate and preserves muscle mass on a calorie restricted diet. Therefore it should be your exercise priority
• High protein intake also preserves muscle mass during fat loss and boosts your metabolism rate
• Use HIIT to increase your fat burning capabilities
• Sorter rest periods in between strength exercises promote more fat loss
• Keep your workouts to 60 minutes only in order to decrease stress hormone response.