Muscle is a large part of your body mass, but it’s contribution to your metabolic rate is greatly over exaggerated in the health and fitness industry.
It is a very important contribution, because outside of exercise it’s one of the only things you can control, but it is exaggerated.
Just like you can’t out exercise a bad diet, you can’t out muscle it either.
(The black is bone, the yellow is body fat, the red is muscle, the blue is the rest of your lean mass…organs etc)
In the graph on the left we see that your muscle mass is shown to make up about 40%ish of your total body weight. ON the right we see that while it makes up 40% (ish) of your entire body weight, in only makes up about 20% percent of your resting metabolic rate.
(FYI – 20% is roughly same amount that your liver or brain contributes to your metabolism)
BP
*Heymsfield SB, et al. Body-size dependence of resting energy expenditure canbe attributed to non-energetic homogeneity of fat-free mass. American Journal of Physiology, Endocrinology and Metabolism. 282:E132-E138; 2002
