How to increase your metabolism And How to Harness Its TRUE Power.

Metabolism is one of those words thrown around the fitness industry, with not much knowledge behind it.

In order to go more in depth about metabolism, we first must learn how your Basal Metabolic Rate is calculated. Your Basal Metabolic Rate is the amount of calories you burn…. at rest. The amount of fat and muscle on your body is what determines the majority of this calorie burn. Meaning, 1lb of “active” fat will burn roughly 20 calories per hour. While 1lb of “active” muscle will burn roughly 50 calories per hour.

Just knowing THAT piece of information, we can brilliantly deduct that if you lose weight, your metabolism will go down. Plain and simple. So how do we INCREASE our metabolism permanently?

At Rise Above Fitness, here in Shorewood, we focus on changing your permanent metabolism. More specifically, INCREASING your metabolism. In fact, I have not met one person who wants a “worse” metabolism. So what do I mean by permanent metabolism. Well, there are a LOT of ways that you can artificially manipulate your metabolism short-term.

Popular workouts that involve HIIT tend to leave people in what the industry calls the “Afterburn Effect.” This is a temporary increase in calorie burn while at rest for the next 24-48 hours. So what that means is, that if you don’t do HIIT, your metabolism will not go up. The problem with this, is that it causes you to do more and more and more work.

The only TRUE way to increase your resting calorie burn permanently is to gain weight. Yep, I said it.

If you gain muscle, or fat, or both, then your overall calorie burn will be higher on a daily basis. Hate to be the bearer of bad news.

Most people when entering the gym for the first time, always have the mindset of lose more weight. Well, losing weight will only go so far. Once the weight starts going down, so does your metabolism. Thus causing an endless cycle of restricting your calories smaller and smaller until you can no longer sustain it, and then binge.

If people instead started to focus on muscle building (even if they are trying to lose weight), they are setting themselves up for success down the road. You see, this one particular point in time has very little importance. Are you doing things today to make your life easier tomorrow? Or next week? Or next year?

I will leave you with one finally analogy. 

Think of your metabolism like your savings account. When your weight goes down, that is like withdrawing from your account. When you put muscle on, that is like depositing into your bank account

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