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In discussing your salary, your boss gives you two options. For one month he will either pay you $100,000 every single day for 30 days or you can get a penny on the first day, two pennies on the second, and four pennies on the third, and on and on, until day 30. What would you choose?

Well, lets do some quick math and decide.

Ok, so it has been over 20 days, and Salary B has barely cleared 10 percent of Salary A. I’ll give you chance to change your mind before we keep going…

Salary B has more than tripled Salary A! This a great lesson in compound interest. Now, I know what you are thinking. What does this have to do with health and fitness? Well the same thing applies to weight loss and calorie expenditure. Let me explain. Let’s say every day you hop on the treadmill and run about a mile. You are burning around 100 calories, or roughly 2 pieces of box chocolate that you have leftover from Christmas. If you do that every single day, you will burn roughly 3,000 calories in a month. A pound of fat is 3,500 calories, so you have almost lost a pound of fat.
But we can try a different approach, within that one month you were able to pump some iron and try to gain muscle instead of running. You were able to gain a respectable amount of one pound of muscle for males or 1/2 a pound of muscle for females. Now for weight training, you can burn calories while exercising, but the big change comes once you already have the muscle on your frame. Each pound of muscle burns approximately 35 to 50 calories every day. Whether you workout that day or not. Let’s put that into a table and see how that would look.

We can do men first:

Now Women:

Don’t get lost in the details. I know metabolism changes, and that these values probably won’t apply to everyone. Just focus on the principle of this exercise. First off, remember how Salary B was only 1/10th of Salary A by day 21? Did you see how it compounded over the next nine days? Think of the caloric expenditure for years to come.

Now, I know you won’t gain a pound of muscle a month every month for the rest of your life, but if we were to only maintain the 6-12 pounds of muscle gained, by let’s say, weight training 2-3 times a week,  you would burn 2 – 5 times more calories the following year than if you ran a mile 7 days a week.Remember burning calories doesn’t necessarily start and end with the treadmill. Try something different and hit the weights for a change!

Your Digital Trainer,

Jeremiah

Images by liroi, tracy_olson

Comments: Do you usually run on the treadmill just to burn calories? Do you see weight training in a similar light as compound interest?

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