Muscular Efficiency, Calorie Burning, and Fat Loss

Efficiency is generally considered a good thing, but when it comes to fitness, it can actually be a problem. Specifically, the issue is with muscular efficiency, because increased muscular efficiency results in fewer calories being burned during workouts, which ultimately means less weight and fat loss.

Muscular efficiency can have a significant effect on the ability to lose fat, but many people are not familiar with how it works, so they don't create their workouts to minimize the negative effects. Therefore, this article will briefly describe muscular efficiency and explain how it affects your results.

Muscular efficiency is basically a measure of the amount of physiological effort it takes to accomplish a particular task. In other words, the higher your muscular efficiency, the less work your body has to do and the fewer calories it burns when performing a task.

The important thing to realize is your level of muscular efficiency varies and it is different for every activity or movement you perform. Muscular efficiency is low for unfamiliar activities/movements and it increases over time based on the number of times and frequency the movement is repeated.

In terms of working out, this means you have a lower muscular efficiency on exercises you have never tried and a higher muscular efficiency on the exercises you perform most frequently.

From a calorie burning standpoint, all other things being equal, you burn the most calories when performing new exercises and the more frequently you perform an exercise, the fewer calories you burn as a result. In other words, increased muscular efficiency leads to inefficient calorie burning.

This is one of the reasons it is so important to have variety in your training and why performing the same exercises over and over causes multiple problems including plateaus, burnout, overtraining, and poor long-term fat loss results.

Always performing the same exercises causes a workout to burn fewer calories than it did when you started training. Repeating the same workout also results in a lack of exercise stimulus, which is a primary cause of plateaus (lack of progress).

In order to burn more calories and increase your workout stimulus (while performing the same exercises), you need to significantly increase the difficulty of each exercise. Unfortunately, this is also problematic, because it puts a lot more strain on your body and makes it harder to recover from your workouts. This ultimately results in overtraining, which not only brings your progress to a halt, but makes your overall fitness and health regress as well.

To avoid these problems, the easiest thing to do is incorporate a large amount of variety in your workouts. When designing workouts for calorie burning and fat loss, you should include exercises for all major muscles, focusing on the larger muscle groups, such as you quads and hamstrings (legs), chest, and back.

Exercises that work multiple muscles at the same time (multi-joint exercises) are ideal. Some examples include the squat, deadlift, lunge, bench press, push-ups, pull-ups, lat pulldown, and bent row.

To get the best results, use multi-joint exercises and mix them up from workout to workout. For example, you can perform split squats (stationary lunges) during one workout, then step back lunges, forward lunges, walking lunges, or pendulum lunges during following workouts.

Try not to perform the same exercise in the same way more than once every week or two. You don't have to completely change the exercises, as even small changes such as switching from a barbell to dumbbells or cables, or changing the incline of a bench or using an exercise ball can all be effective.

By constantly changing up the exercises in your workouts, you will keep your muscular efficiency lower, so your calorie burning efficiency stays higher and you will burn more calories relative to your level of effort. This might still be a little confusing, but basically, the less accustomed your body is to a particular exercise, the more calories you burn.

To give you a better example of how this works, pretend you are just learning the barbell bench press exercise. At first, you may use 80-90% of your chest muscle fibers to perform the exercise, but if you perform the exercise during every workout, fairly soon you may only be using 60-70% of those muscle fibers, due to increased muscular efficiency.

Since fewer muscle fibers are used to accomplish the same amount of work, there is a lower physiological demand, less energy is used, and fewer calories are burned. By maximizing the variety in your workouts, you are essentially keeping your body guessing and not letting it get completely used to each exercise too quickly.

This is one of the best ways to get the most out of your workouts when your goal is maximize calorie burning and fat loss. However, it is important to understand that while this approach works great for fat loss and general health and fitness programs, it is not ideal for everyone. In some cases, muscular efficiency is truly a good thing instead of a problem.

Any time your goal is to improve performance in a specific task or activity, increasing your muscular efficiency is beneficial. In particular, you should improve your muscular efficiency in exercises that are most similar to the movements in the specific activity you want to improve. For example, jumping is an important skill in basketball, so basketball players should work to increase their muscular efficiency in exercises that are similar to the jumping motion.

By improving muscular efficiency in exercises and movements related to sports or other activities, such as jumping, it allows those activities to be performed with a less energy. While this is bad for trying to burn the maximum number of calories with the least amount of effort, it is great for performance, because less energy used ultimately means less fatigue. Therefore, you can participate in an activity for a longer amount of time before your performance starts to suffer.

Increasing muscular efficiency can have positive or negative effects, depending on your needs and goals, so it is important to design your workouts to use muscular efficiency to the best advantage for your particular situation. In most cases, it is best to maximize the variety in your workouts, but there are certainly occasions where you want to repeat some exercises more frequently.

Source:

14 years of experience and education in health and fitness