n that current data indicates that each pound of muscle might burn an additional 6 calories (as opposed to older values of 25-40 cal/lb or even higher) (1), this argument is no longer tenable; to significantly affect metabolic rate would require a monstrous gain of muscle mass, far more than you could gain in 3-4 weeks.
Even if you gained 10 pounds of muscle, that would only add up to an additional 60 calories burned per day, hardly enough to worry about and certainly not enough to affect the following diet. Which isn't to say that diets don't work better after short or even medium periods of overfeeding, mind you, it's simply not because of gains in muscle mass.
A more recent idea making the rounds in bodybuilding nutrition is that, prior to trying to gain lean body mass, people should diet down first. This reasoning is based on a variety of data that has examined the changes in body composition that occur when you overfeed either thin or fat individuals
|