Weight lifting and weight loss

When people embark on a weight loss journey, they will think of doing cardio such as running, biking, swimming and there is often a mis-conception that this is the only form of exercise you can do to lose weight.

Although cardio may be the go to, lifting weights can also be a great way to burn off fat and stimulate muscle growth at the same time.

More mass is more fuel

As we know, when you start weight training your body is breaking down the muscle to rebuild and come back stronger and in turn, bigger. So if your muscles are getting bigger this will result in a higher body mass.

Imagine your body as an engine, the more you build that engine the more fuel it is going to need to run, so your body is naturally going to burn through more energy and calories on a day-to-day basis if it needs more fuel. This essentially means without implementing cardio around a weight training programme you can still lose weight.

With all this in mind, If you're tracking your progress and results and regularly use the scales for weight loss purposes, it's important to know that muscle weighs more than fat. Therefore, if you're building muscle your weigh ins may not give an accurate analysis of your progress and you should perhaps focus on pictures and your bodies composition.

Cardio Vs Weights

Both cardio and weights are effective and proven methods to burning calories and aiding weight loss. During a cardiovascular workout, it is highly likely that you will burn a higher number of calories then you would a weight training workout. However, weight training has been proven to help increase your resting metabolism and in turn burning more calories for a longer duration of time.

As said previously, weight training will aid in muscle development to which the rebuild process will require fuel to do this effectively. Your resting metabolism links to the amount of calories you burn while recovering/resting. It has been shown to increase this by over 24hours to where as a cardio workout typically will not offer this benefit.

To optimise your results, you can integrate the two methods into your workout plan, enabling you to reap the benefits of both.

Integrating the two

A number of workout plans focussed around weight loss may have you do resistance exercises one day and cardiovascular workouts another. However, integrating the two can be a great way to increase the intensity of your workout and reap the benefits of both methods. A prime way of integrating both cardio and resistance exercises is circuit training.

Circuit training will enable you to elevate your heart rate high enough to burn fat as well as break down muscle tissue to induce growth.

What is circuit training?

Circuit training consist of having multiple stations focussing on a particular exercise to which you perform for a certain amount of time or number of repetitions, you will then move onto the next station and repeat the process for that specific exercise. On average you will do this with around 5-6 different stations which will create your circuit.

Circuit training is a great way to integrate variety into your workouts as you can incorporate different equipment, body weight or free weight exercises. You can also adjust the intensity of the session to suit your needs by simply altering the weight or duration of the exercises performed.