Strength Training To Lose Weight

Firstly, aerobic evercise only actually burns fat while you're doing the exercise. Within a few minutes of stopping jogging, your metabolism returns t normal and you stop burning fat and so losing weight. In contrast, strength training using weights boosts your metabolism for up to 40 hours and so a far longer-term effect on weight loss. In short you get a bigger bang for your buck with strength training as opposed to cardio.

Secondly, maintaining muscle takes up a lot of energy. Two people of the same height could burn substantially different amounts of carbohydrates if one is mostly fat while the other is mostly muscle. Indeed, the person who has more muscle will naturally burn more calories at rest as their body needs them to support their muscle mass. This means fo course that they tend to stay slimmer because there are less "excess" calories after a meal than can be laid down as fat.

Thirdly, "old fashioned" exercises to lose weight often resulted in loss of muscle mass together with the fat. So you didn't get lean and muscular like you were hoping, you got bony and spindly - not a good look for anyone. By using strength training for weight loss you are working your muscles on a regular basis and so either maintaining or even growing your lean muscle mass.

All these elements lead to one conclusion - you need to include strength training to lose weight effectively and safely.

I personally have found that as the body will burn fat for up to 40 hours after a strength training workout, by attending the gym 3 times a week your body shoul be stoked and burning fat for the entire week.

At each of those sessions I take 2 exercises per muscle - such as flyes and chest press for the pectoral muscles or bicep hammer curls and barbell curls for biceps and carry out 2 sets of 10 reps foe each exercise, back to back.

Every 2-3 weeks I up the weight I am using so I can only lift 10 reps before I need to take a break and this seems to work very well for my purposes. I also make sure I consume a reasonable amount of protein to help support muscle recovery between workouts.

An additional suggestion which I am experimenting with at the moment is including some high intensity cardio and turning this into a hybrid-style interval training session as opposed to a standad strength training session.

In this way, while recovering from one set of weights, you jump on a stationery bike or treadmill and spend a minute at full pelt there. This means you're in action non-stop for the 45 minutes or so each workout takes which can be a challenge even for the fittest people. The upside is you end up burning so much fat and losing so much weight you'll wonder why you never tried it before!