A general rule is to aim to burn 400-500 calories, five days a week during your workouts. Remember, the number of calories you burn in a workout depends on your weight, sex, age and many other factors, but this number is a good starting place.
So, in order to safely and effectively gain muscle, you need to increase your total calorie intake by a minimum of 3500 calories per week.
As a general rule, a good place to start is aiming to burn around 400 to 500 calories per day, five days a week during your workouts, she said.
As a very loose guideline, the general recommended daily calorie intake for men is 2,500 and for women is 2,000. If you're fairly inactive, a healthy target for weight loss would be around 1,300 - 1,500 for women and 1,800 - 2,000 calories for men.
It will depend on who are you, how often your exercise and how much your eating, but a target of 200 to 500 calories is realistic and sustainable per session. For context, if you're running a 10k, a 160lb person would burn about 715 calories. But your goal might be to increase your strength and tone up.
Running is the winner for most calories burned per hour. Stationary bicycling, jogging, and swimming are excellent options as well. HIIT exercises are also great for burning calories.
Running at even a slow pace burns a lot of calories for 30 minutes. On average, running burns between 10.8 to 16 calories per minute and putting it at the top of the list of workouts that burn the most calories.
No matter what type of diet you follow, to lose weight you need to burn more calories than you take in each day. For most people with overweight, cutting about 500 calories a day is a good place to start.
You have to burn about 3,500 calories to lose 1 pound. This is because 3,500 calories equals about 1 pound of fat. To lose 1 pound a week, you have to eliminate 500 calories from your diet every day. At that pace, you could lose about 4 pounds in a month.
In general, weightlifting for 30 minutes can burn between 90 and 126 calories, depending on a person's body weight. Vigorous weight lifting for 30 minutes may burn between 180 to 252 calories, depending on a person's body weight.
Cardiovascular exercise
Before you worry about toning up, you need to shed any excess fat. Running, biking, and swimming are the most efficient ways to accomplish this. While exercising for 30 minutes 3-4 times a week is the minimum amount recommended, you're probably going to want to do more to reach your goals.
The answer: Depending on how often you exercise and the intensity of your workouts, give it between four to eight weeks for your muscles to get ripped, says Kawamoto.
“At 6 to 8 weeks, you can definitely notice some changes,” said Logie, “and in 3 to 4 months you can do a pretty good overhaul to your health and fitness.” Strength-specific results take about the same amount of time.
If you are already lean (<20% body fat), you can see noticeable improvements in muscle tone in as little as 6-8 weeks. The more muscle you have, the faster your body will respond to exercise.
To make gains you have to have the right nutrients in your body to construct muscle. This means that what you eat, and how much, is essential in making muscle gains. Lifting and doing strength training without adequate nutrition, especially without enough protein, can actually lead to loss of muscle tissue.
Consider increasing your protein intake to 30% of your calories or roughly 1 gram per pound of body weight/day if you are looking to drop some pounds and tone up.
The largest muscles (and therefore the largest calorie burners) are in the thighs, abdomen, chest, and arms.