The Correlation Between Muscle Mass & Calories Burned

How many calories you need a day depends on body makeup as well as how active you are. The Mayo Clinic recommends that everyone engage in at least 30 minutes of physical activity every day. Exercises that build muscle boost your metabolism and daily energy requirements.

Metabolism and Calories

The body turns food into energy. The calories you eat each day fuels your metabolic furnace. Carbohydrates are the fuel of choice for metabolism and the body stores them as glycogen in the liver and in muscle tissue. When a body needs energy to move or exert itself over long periods of moderate exercise, it metabolizes stored fat. The more you exercise, the more calories you burn each day.

Resting Metabolism Rate

Even if you don't exercise or move all day, you still burn calories just to sustain basic bodily functions such as respiration and digestion. Resting metabolic rate determines how much energy you expend just lying on a couch all day. Resting metabolic rate slows as you age or if you lose a lot of weight quickly. Typically, athletes or people with more muscle and less fat have higher metabolic rates, because muscle has higher energy requirements than fat tissue. People with more muscle tissue than fat tissue have higher resting metabolic rates and burn more calories per day than those with less muscle and more fat in their body makeup. The more muscle mass a person builds through exercise, the more calories her resting metabolism requires.

Muscle Mass Gain

Muscle tissue burns energy calories faster than fat tissue. It requires more energy than fat to maintain itself and so, it burns more calories pound for pound than fat. Exactly how many more calories muscle burns than fat is a matter of debate, but the article "Increased Energy Requirements and Changes in Body Composition With Resistance Training in Older Adults" that appeared in the "American Journal of Applied Nutrition" summarized the results of a study of healthy older adults before and after a program of resistance weight training. It concluded that participants' resting metabolic rate increased over the period, and that the subjects lost body fat.

Exercises

Simple exercises that use gravity and the body as resistance, such as push-ups and chin-ups, build muscle and do not need fancy equipment or require a gym membership. Weight machines offer smooth and even resistance, and you can track progress easily. The machines position you properly to avoid injury or accidents. Free weights allow you to work out the smaller supporting muscles as well as the larger muscle groups in the body. All weight-bearing exercise helps build muscle mass and thus increase metabolic rate and calories burned each day.

Aerobic Exercise and Diet

Weight training combined with aerobic exercise and moderate reduction in calories works better to burn off fat than weight training alone. Aerobic exercises such as running, swimming or cross-country skiing burn the calories needed to help replace fat tissue with lean muscle mass. In order to build muscle mass while burning calories and fat tissue, the body needs adequate nutrition. Eating a diet low in refined sugars, added salt and fats provides healthy fuel for the body.