I cant tell you how many times I’ve heard people who want to get into shape say theyre going to turn their fat into muscle. Well, unless youre a magician or a hocus pocus specialist, you cant turn fat into muscle just like you cant turn water into oil or a cat into a dog.
Muscle and fat are different types of tissue. Muscle is commonly referred to as lean muscle because it takes up less space on the body than fat tissue about 18% less space to be precise. Fat tissue AKA Body fat just kinda sits on us like a big, yellow blob. This is one of the reasons Im always telling people who want to lose weight to weight train but thats another story.
So where does the confusion come from?
When you add lean muscle tissue to your body by strength training (or resistance training if that sounds better to you) you increase your RMR (resting metabolic rate) the biggest component of your metabolism.
The more muscle you have on your body the higher your metabolism the more fat your body burns the leaner and tighter you look period
So because youre adding lean muscle tissue and burning body fat, it may seem as if youre turning fat into muscle, but youre not you are burning more fat off your body by adding calorie consuming muscle which gives you a leaner appearance.
Think of it this way remember that old Atari game Pacman?
Muscle is Pacman. It goes around eating up those little white dots we can compare to body fat cells.
By the way, the opposite is also true when we become out of shape, our muscles dont become fat we just wind up losing muscle and gaining fat. If you wanna read more on this, I found a great link here
Hope this clears that myth up!
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