How To Lose Weight By Lifting Weights
Can losing excess weight and building the muscles go together? The simple answer is yes!
When your muscles are developed, your metabolic rate increases, leading to the burning of more fat and the loss of more calories.
The logic is simple. Muscles tend to burn off more calories when the body is at rest. The more your muscle mass, the more calories you lose.
Do you know one sure way to develop your muscles? Yes, you guessed right. Weightlifting.
While belly fat gas has always been the target of most people who lift weights, the entire body can benefit from weightlifting.
Let’s see in detail how this happens. But first, let’s look at some of the significant benefits of weightlifting, including, of course, weight loss.
Benefits of Weightlifting
- Burning of body/belly fat: Just as was noted earlier, the more muscles you build, the easier it is for you to burn fat, even when you’re at rest. While many exercises can also help burn fat, they don’t do much lifting weights. This is because most aerobic exercises burn fat as well as muscles. But weightlifting burns the fats and develops while building the muscles. The same is true of belly fat, which can also lead to general weight loss when you shed the off
- Loss of excess calories: As noted earlier, when your muscles are developed (especially from weightlifting), you lose calories even when you’re at rest. The more weight you lift, the more calories you burn.
- Development of muscles: The muscles are better developed when you lift weights.
- Stronger bones and body: Another advantage of weightlifting is the building of bones. The muscles and the bones work together, so one naturally affects the other. Lifting weights can also help to build new bones in some cases. Overall, weightlifters have stronger bodies.
- Greater flexibility: The body becomes more flexible when weights are lifted, often.
- Heart improvement: Another essential benefit of lifting weights is the improvement of heart health.
We are, however, focused on the weight loss benefits of weight lifting. So, how exactly does this happen?
How does Weight Lifting Help you Lose Weight?
Everyone knows that weight lifting leads to weight loss. But, how?
We must note a critical point before we go on. Every weight-loss adventure only succeeds when the calories you consume aren’t as much as what you burn. In other words, weightlifting is not a magic formula that reduces your weight just like that.
We are used to seeing significant weightlifters on the covers of magazines and billboards. This has led many to assume that lifting weights is synonymous with getting big erroneously. That’s not true.
Lifting weights help you convert lots of calories into muscle-building energy. The truth is that our muscles say a lot about our health. When your weight-loss program incorporates muscle developments as weightlifting does, then you are on a path to a fitter body.
Two things happen when you lift weights. You increase your muscle mass, and you burn fat. Lifting weights is a better exercise than many others if weight loss is the goal.
Muscle development is the game-changer here. When your muscles develop and have less fat, your metabolic rate improves. When your metabolic rate improves, you burn more calories even while resting. It’s that simple.
There are many ways of losing weight. But the advantage of weightlifting is that it also builds muscles. Other methods of losing weight often lead to a drop in metabolic rate because the body reacts to the decrease in weight.
But with weightlifting, as your muscles develop, calories would be shed by the body at a faster rate when you’re at rest than before you started lifting the weights.
Losing weight shouldn’t just be about shedding calories because that alone may not lead to a healthy, functional body.
How Many Calories are you Expending by Lifting Weights?
Lifting weights can burn up different amounts of calories depending on body weight. Generally speaking, a person weighing 155 pounds is expected to burn between 250-400 calories for every hour of lifting weights.
However, the actual amount depends on several factors, including how much weight is being lifted, that is, how HARD you’re working, your own weight, and how well built your muscles already are.
Other factors that determine the number of calories burnt include the muscles being actively used, the type of lift you perform, and how heavy your lifts are.
So, two people may spend the same time lifting the same amount of weights and burn different amounts of calories in the process.
However, it is also known that those who work at a stretch burn more calories than those who take rests in between.
You can also use your body weight to know your calorie needs per day and work on that data when lifting weights. If you’re not very active, you will likely need about 15 calories per pound of your body weight.
More active persons need about 18 calories for every pound of body weight. A weightlifting man weighing 150 pounds would need about 2,700 calories each day.
With this information, you should be able to calculate how many calories you need per day how many excess calories you need to lose, especially if weight loss is your goal.
To get an accurate figure of how many calories you burn when lifting weights, you can use an online calorie calculator, which factors all the variables and gives you an exact figure.
Weight Loss VS Muscle Toning
We noted earlier that weight loss is simply the creation of a calorie deficit; that is, you lose more calories than you gain through food.
There are many ways of achieving a calorie deficit. Exercise and dieting are the two most common ways of achieving this aim. Weight loss is simply weight loss.
Sometimes, it’s the loss of body fat, which is a good thing; at other times, it is a loss of muscle, which is not particularly good.
That’s where muscle toning comes in. Your overall fitness is not just a function of reduced weight but finer, better muscles.
When you’re doing not just weight loss but muscle toning, you’re fitter, better, and more robust. You’re also healthier because a well-built muscle means you’re not as prone to injury as others.
Your muscles become more pronounced even as you lose excess fat and burn calories. If you’ve ever admired an athlete’s physique, it is not just because he (or she) maintained an ideal weight; it is because the muscles have been toned.
The muscles wouldn’t be too big or bulky but they will be very conspicuous. That is why top athletes look the way they do!
When you tone your muscles, you increase lean muscle mass, building up your body while losing weight.
You can lose weight without any functional training, but you can never tone your body without training it.
Change of diet, for example, can lead to positive or negative body weight changes. You are on a muscle toning adventure if you want to lose weight by lifting weights.
Weight loss may mean many things but does not always mean an increase in metabolic rate. The only weight loss that also leads to increased metabolic rate is the one that develops the muscles.
That means the metabolic rate increases, leading to loss of body fat and better fitness.
How to Supplement Weight Training for Fat Loss
If you’re serious about weight training, and it seems the results aren’t as encouraging as expected, you may want to incorporate supplements.
Resistance training or weight training is an essential type of exercise used to lose body fat. However, some things can serve as supplements to lose weight and build stronger muscles.
One meaningful way is to increase protein intake. Protein is the primary building block of the muscles and the body. Protein intake should not be limited to protein-rich food but could be supplemented.
Examples of protein supplements include the branched-chain amino acids, which make up about one-sixth of the amino acids in the muscles, and Beta-Alanine, which can reduce fatigue while following vigorous exercise schedules.
When the goal is to lose fat and gain muscle strength, additional proteins will help immensely.
Conclusion
Lifting weights is a good way of losing weight, burning fat, and losing calories. The activity is great because it helps to build muscles.
Building your muscles while losing weight is a brilliant idea because it can increase your metabolic rate. When this happens, you burn more calories when you’re at rest.
Resources:
