An Easy Way To Add Pounds
Doug Scott is the Strength Coach for the Pingry School in Martinsville, New Jersey. He explains how pounds are not always pounds.
Since muscle is metabolically active it’s a significant contributor to one's basal metabolic rate. This means the more lean muscle mass you have, the more energy (calories) you will be burning throughout the day.
The old adage of, “a pound of muscle weighs more than a pound of fat”, is not true as
16 ounces make up a pound regardless of the substance. However, since muscle is comprised of mostly water and protein it has less volume than fatty tissue. While increasing your muscle mass is very important, there is an unfortunate gradual decline in muscle tissue as you age, termed sarcopenia.
On average, a person will start to lose .5-1.0 pounds of skeletal muscle each year after age 25. Which means that about 3 years after you graduate from college you will start losing muscle tissue and strength. To put it another way, if your weight is 130lbs at age 25 and at age 35 you still weight 130lbs, you have actually lost 10 pounds of muscle and gained 10 pounds of body fat. What can you do? Strength train and Get Strong!
Notre Dame and NFL standout Ron Israel trains a client on the Hip Press at Hard Pressed in Chicago