Plus a bonus benefit at the end.
Often times you will hear advice like, “to lose weight, just move more and eat less.” “Calories in, calories out.” And while true, it isn’t very helpful advice. Additionally, it may not help you achieve you ideal results, or at least not by itself. If you want to actually feel better, look better, gain strength and improve your functional movement, resistance training of some form needs to be a pillar of your exercise routine.
Here are 5 ways resistance training benefits your weight loss efforts.
1. It Burns Calories
This is the obvious low hanging fruit, but lifting weights burns a similar amount of calories to most forms of exercise. How many calories it burns depends largely on intensity, exercise selection, rest periods and other variations like your weight and sex.
Take for example a typical 30 minute lifting session. For easy math let’s say you burned 200 calories and its a fairly intense, high paced session. While that may not sound like a lot (please don’t trust those activity watches and their “burned calories” estimates), what if you do that 5 times a week? That’s 1,000 calories from the activity of lifting alone, and it only took you 2.5 hours out of your week.
If you combine this energy expenditure (exercise) with energy restriction (eating fewer calories) you can compound the effects for greater fat loss.
Tip: Want to really burn calories while lifting? Try out circuit style training. This training technique is where you stack 3 or 4 exercises together without rest periods between them, instead resting after the circuit is complete and then repeating the process. Example: Bodyweight Squats/Pushups/Assisted Pullups/Planks. Rest 60 seconds. Repeat.
You can mess around with the length of the rest period depending on your ability to recover your breath and strength. It is recommended to use exercises that have little to no overlap of muscle groups, which is why in that example I selected a leg movement, chest movement, back movement, and core movement.
2. Builds and Retains Muscle
One of the problems of focusing strictly on “weight loss” is that it does not differentiate between the types of tissue you have lost. In fact, without any form of resistance training, you are highly likely to lose muscle at a similar rate to fat when in a caloric deficit.
You need to give the body a reason to retain, or even grow, muscle when it isn’t getting enough calories. After all, our body is a survival mechanism first and foremost. If you don’t fuel it enough it will start to catabolize itself. And while fat stores are the first to go, muscle is energy demanding so when the body is trying to conserve energy it will also take excess muscle with it.
However, if you give the body a reason to retain that valuable muscle (i.e. lifting), it will think twice before getting rid of muscle as you are literally training your body to expect the need for muscle. This is also a survival mechanism (if you had to pull yourself up to safety or fight regularly to survive, your body would adapt quickly).
If you wish to learn about the health benefits of muscle, I recommend you check out Dr. Gabrielle Lyon’s Youtube channel.
3. Improves Your Resting Metabolism
Here’s something you may not know: For every pound of muscle mass on your body you burn roughly 100 calories per day. Just sitting around and existing.
If you extrapolate that out and gain 5 lbs of muscle in a year (very likely in your first year of weight training), you would suddenly be burning 500 more calories per day by default. Over a week that adds up to 3,500 calories. One pound of fat is storage of 3,000 calories. So in other words, your body will naturally burn more than a pound of fat per week by merely being 5 lbs more muscular.
Now obviously if you eat more than that, you won’t actually lose body fat and will actually gain a little. But you can see how you make things a lot easier on yourself if you gain muscle. For every pound of muscle gained, you have 100 more calories of wiggle room per day. Whether you want to drop fat or simply not plump up when you “relax” your diet to maintenance, this makes the life of weight management a lot easier.
4. Improves Body Composition
Weight loss is great and all, but what if you just shrink up to a smaller version of your same body? That isn’t always what is desired. More often than not, some body reshaping is desired. If I’m overweight and shaped like a pear, I don’t want to lose weight to become a… smaller pear. As a man I naturally want to build more of a V-taper to my body.
This is where weight lifting comes in. First of all, the health benefits of increased muscle and reduced fat are vast. If you take one individual and simply improve their body composition, you will see significant improvements in most health measures.
Additionally, it alters your body form in a visually pleasing way. Suddenly your posture is improved, definition is starting to show, and your overall proportions become more traditionally favorable. While this isn’t usually the most important aim of lifting, it can be important to some people to improve confidence and motivation. Eventually when some fat is lost, the muscle will start to show more and more. It’s always nice to actually see your progress.
This translates to both sexes, as women will usually (but not always) err on the side of wanting to become more “toned,” but tone is simply another way of saying lose fat and gain muscle. Terms like “get toned” and “body recomposition” effectively mean the same thing.
Oh btw, if you’re concerned with the aesthetic side of body composition and are worried about sagging, cellulite, or non-ideal proportions, resistance training is your best bet to combat it. Muscle is a firm tissue and takes up space, so it causes the skin and fat to spread over a larger area (making fat appear smaller), creating a smoother, firmer appearance. Additionally, it accentuates the more attractive curves of the body. Whether you want a large chest and slim waist or a big round booty, lifting is a huge part of achieving it.
Bonus: It May Even Trigger Muscle Building & Fat Burning Communication At The Cellular Level
Illuminated in this NY Times article, it was found that some unique communication occurs between skeletal muscle and adipose tissue (muscle and fat) at the cellular level when resistance training is performed. Effectively, it appears that after an intense bout of lifting, the muscles sent miR-1 (which prevents muscle growth) to the fat stores instead. This then enables the muscles to grow immediately, and it also starts the process of fat cells breaking down into fatty acids (to be used as fuel). So while the old tale of “you can turn your fat into muscle” isn’t literally true, as in all things, there are glimmers of truth in most tales. If you wish to review the full study it can be found here.
Hopefully you find these tips helpful. If you want to add something of your own, comment below!
Thanks for reading!
Jeff Hill
