How Strength Training is Your Secret Weapon for Weight Loss
Exercise is an essential facet of a healthy lifestyle. Moving your body has incredible benefits from maintaining a healthy weight, improving your muscle and bone strength, your cardiovascular health, and even your mood and cognition.
Despite the range of benefits, the most common reason that people start exercising is to lose weight. There is a lot of debate about whether cardio or strength training is more effective when it comes to achieving weight loss.
The truth is, both forms of exercise have benefits, but people tend to lean into more cardiovascular exercise when they learn that you burn more calories in a single cardio session than you might during a weight training session.
While true, this can be deceiving, because although you might burn less calories during your workout, strength training has some residual benefits that lead to higher calorie burn and metabolism, even when you are at rest.
Let’s dive into the benefits of strength training and make the case for why you should ditch the elliptical machine and spend more time in the weight room.
More muscle means a higher metabolism
Although it’s true that you will burn more calories in a single cardio workout than a strength training one, strength training actually leads to more calories burned overall.
How?
To understand, let’s talk about how calories are used by our bodies. Calories that you consume by eating food are turned into energy that your body uses to do everything from speaking, thinking, and even digesting.
When you do vigorous cardio exercise, your body uses the available calories that your body hasn’t already used for its background functions like those described. Once those available calories are used up, your body turns to burning stored fat to keep going.
One important function of your muscle cells for weight loss is that lean muscle mass burns more calories at rest than other tissues like your skin and fat cells.
What it all boils down to is that cardio is a really effective way to burn a lot of calories during a workout session, but building your muscle mass will actually cause your body to have a higher overall metabolism.
In the end, you might burn 300 calories during a 30 minute run and then quickly make that up by grabbing an oat milk latte on your way home. Conversely, if you focus on building more muscle, you will enjoy more calories burned each day before you even break a sweat.
The hidden cost of cardio
Like I mentioned, the calories you burn during an intense cardio session are made up for quite quickly in your diet. We are also beginning to better understand that your body actually compensates the calories you burn in exercise in sneaky ways.
The short version is that your body generally aims to keep you in a state of homeostasis. So, when you burn a bunch of calories working out, your body will compensate by slowing down digestion or even making you less fidgety to save calories.
You can read about it more in depth in this post.
One such effect is that cardio can actually make you hungrier, especially compared to other forms of exercise. At the end of the day, it is really difficult to actually increase the amount of calories you burn overall through vigorous exercise and you may end up overdoing your calories because you feel hungrier after your workout.
You are better off focusing on exercise that increases your metabolism overall and controlling your calorie intake from food.
Targeting fat cells
The connection between strength training and increasing muscle mass is pretty straightforward. However, there is some fascinating new research that is giving us a deeper understanding about how strength training can affect your body on a cellular level.
In one study that looked at both mice and people, researchers found that your cells actually talk to each other in a process called cellular crosstalk, activated when you engage in strength training exercises.
What are those cells saying to each other?
Well, it turns out that when you strength train, your muscle cells create little bubbles of genetic material incased in vesicles. We used to believe that these vesicles only contained waste material, but researchers have found that they actually carry viable, important genetic information that is interpreted and used by other cells.
After your workout, these vesicles are sent out by your muscle cells and they target fat cells. When the fat cells absorb the vesicles, the information contained within instructs the fat cells that it’s time to break apart into fatty acids. These fatty acids are used as an energy source by other cells in your body.
In short, strength training exercise actually triggers your body to use stored fat for energy as opposed to using the calories from food that we discussed earlier.
Other benefits of strength training
Burning fat isn’t the only weight related benefit to strength training, although this could be extremely important when you are working towards specific goals.
Other benefits of strength training include managing chronic conditions that are hard on your body and can make it much harder to maintain an active lifestyle conducive to weight management.
For example, resistance training strengthens not only your muscles but your bones and joints. Building strength can ease pain related to conditions such as arthritis, back and joint pain, and obesity.
In addition, strength training seems to ease symptoms of heart disease and diabetes. In general, regular exercise can improve symptoms of depression and anxiety and stabilize your mood.
All of these conditions are intimately tied to our motivation to workout, whether it’s physical pain or mental blocks that prevent you from feeling motivated.
How much is enough?
When it comes to losing weight, incorporating strength training into your routine will help you reach your goals faster, but how much should you be doing?
Doctors and health professionals recommend at least 150 minutes of moderate physical exercise every week and at least 2-3 days of resistance training incorporated into that routine.
What this looks like in practice is different for everyone, and depends on your interests and lifestyle. Most simply, aim to get your heart rate elevated for about 30 minutes per day five days per week and add in strength building workouts 2-3 days per week.
If you are comfortable in the gym, hit the weights room or use the resistance machines. You can also achieve the same results at home by doing simple bodyweight exercises. Yoga, pilates, and swimming are also great options for more low-impact forms of strength training.
For more ideas about strength training at home or at the gym, check out this post.
Don’t discount your diet
At the end of the day, any form of exercise won’t help you lose weight if you are overeating. Regardless of your muscle mass, having a balanced diet and consuming fewer calories than you burn in a day is still an essential part of maintaining a healthy weight.
Make sure that you are addressing all aspects of your lifestyle for a well-rounded and sustainable weight loss, building routines that you can continue long after you hit your goals and switch to the maintenance phase of weight management.
When you start to support your health through a balanced diet and exercise routine, you gain much more than you lose in your pant size. You can count on a better mood, and better health outcomes overall.
References:
