The Importance of Strength Training when it Comes to Weight Loss

Most people know that cardio training is great for weight loss, a the majority of people try to stick with just doing cardio, because that is what they know. However, a far smaller percentage of people chose to use strength based training for their weight loss. This small percentage are the ones that get the best results.

When doing cardio training, most of the time your body will be burning far more calories than during a strength training session. However, once you stop training cardio, unless you are doing high intensity intervals, your body will quickly stop burning those calories. When strength training, as long as you work your muscles properly, your body will continue burning extra calories (usually in the form of stored bodyfat) for up to 3 days! Now, this extra amount can really add up; for most people it is around 10% of their metabolism as extra calorie burning, which ends up being around 100-150 calories a day. This might not sound like much, but that is on top of whatever calories you would normally be burning.

So all of a sudden, your next cardio session becomes more effective, because you are already burning extra calories! In fact, you don’t even need to do that cardio session to burn calories – you could be sitting on the couch at home, or at the desk at work, and you are burning those extra calories! To put things into perspective, 1kg of bodyfat has roughly 9000 calories, so over the week, your body is burning somewhere around an extra 100g of bodyfat without you having to do anything!

This is one side of the benefit, which is the short term benefit. The other side, which is the longer term benefit, which makes your body more resistant to putting fat back on, is that every kilo of lean muscle that your body has burns roughly 100 calories a day, just through functioning and normal movements.

For most people, increasing their lean muscle by 2-3kg within 2-3 months is not at all unreasonable – even for women, with this muscle being denser, rather than the increased size that men will get. This is where things really start to add up; that 200-300 calories a day end up being around 1750 calories on average per week. Again, this is just extra calories your body will burn regardless, and ends up being around 200g of body fat that your body burns up!

This is why strength training is so important for a long term weight loss result – increasing your metabolism like this makes weight loss easier, and putting body fat back on much harder! However, you need to make sure you are training at the right intensity for this to be most effective. Training with a Personal Trainer will ensure that you are pushing hard enough to get the best results!