When looking to lose weight the majority of people will cut calories and perform regular cardio to help burn away that stubborn body fat. This is the correct way to lose weight as long as you are not starving yourself or cutting calories too drastically. But what about weight lifting? Unless you are a bodybuilder there is a good chance that you will neglect any form of weight lifting and focus solely on weight loss. Is weight lifting for weight loss effective?
Weight Lifting For Weight Loss
The answer is yes! Weight lifting for weight loss is extremely effective when it comes to losing weight and will help you burn fat more consistantly overtime. As you may or may not already know, weight loss can be greatly influenced by your metabolism. Your body’s metabolism is the rate at which your body burns off calories throughout the day.
Drastically cutting your calories will also drastically reduce the speed of your metabolism making it increasingly harder to burn fat and lose weight. This leads me to my first point of why weight lifting should be included in your daily weight loss routines:
Metabolism. Weight lifting can have a positive effect on your metabolism. Weight lifting will elevate your metabolism and help you burn more calories throughout the day. Studies have shown that weight lifting may even elevate the metabolism for longer periods than cardio. An elevated metabolism leads to more calories being burnt.
Maintain Muscle. It is thought that the majority of people who are on a weight loss diet lose significant amounts of muscle tissue. Main reason for this is because they cut calories too much and do not participate in any form of weight lifting or resistance training. Weight lifting will help your body maintain its current amount of muscle mass and allow the body to burn more fat.
Build Muscle. When adding weight lifting into your weight loss routine you will have the potential to lose fat and build muscle. If you are new to weight lifting then losing fat and building muscle can certainly be done. The reason why maintaining and building muscle is so important during weight loss is because the more muscle tissue you have the more calories you burn.
When you burn away muscle tissue instead of fat it causes your bodys metabolism to slow down making weight loss increasingly difficult. As a result you may need to lower your calories even further. Muscle tissue is metabolically active so the less muscle mass you have the less calories your body will burn. Build or maintain your muscle mass through weight lifting and your weight loss results will greatly improve. Weight loss will be more consistant and a weight loss plateau will become less likely.
