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Maintaining a healthy calorie deficit is essential for weight loss, and regularly exercising is one of the best ways to achieve this deficit without depriving yourself of the foods you love. While some exercises are more effective at torching calories than others, each form of exercise has its own valuable benefits to offer your body which can help to improve your cardiovascular strength, build up your muscles, and even boost your metabolism for increased fat burn throughout the day. Cardio exercises are often regarded as top of the totem pole for weight loss, raising your heart rate and promoting calorie burn. However, there’s another form of low-impact exercise which may be just as effective when it comes to full-body weight loss–no running required.
Weight training is excellent for fat loss for a number of reasons, starting with muscle growth and the versatility it offers so you never grow fatigued from your workout plan. When you complete the same exercise over and over your body becomes accustomed to the stress you’re putting it under and will eventually adapt if you don’t continue to increase the difficulty of your workout.
Because of this, weight training is a great solution as you can continue to increase the weights you’re using, challenging your body more for further calorie burn. “In order to avoid metabolic adaptation and boredom, it’s best to constantly change the workout not only through FITT, Frequency, Intensity, Time and Type, but on the micro level of the movement itself,” explains CPT Norma Lowe.
Lifting weights can have a profound effect on your weight loss success as it has been proven to increase overall calorie burn throughout the day, even outside of your workout window. “It’s a well known fact that the main benefit of resistance training for weight loss is the prolonged fat burning effects it leaves behind. Strength training increases our lean muscle mass which increases our resting metabolic rate (RMR), or the amount of energy you use while at rest,” notes Lowe.
The more muscle you have on your body, the higher your metabolism will be and the more fat you will burn at rest, so while cardio can be useful for torching calories, weight training may have a better impact on your fat loss over time.
In order to achieve the best results, working out 4-5 days each week will be sufficient, but it’s important to build rest days into your schedule so as not to burn out your body. Rest is essential for rebuilding the microscopic muscle tears that you’re creating each time you do a strenuous workout, so in order for your muscles to actually grow and recover you need to give your body the chance to rest at least once a week, even if that’s an active recovery day like light yoga or stretching.
“A low impact workout program should include movements for all the major muscle groups and a recovery day or two if you need it,” says Lowe. Keeping variety in your workout and targeting each muscle group will also help with full body weight loss in order to achieve a balanced and healthy physique.
At the end of the day the most important thing about your workout routine is finding a form of exercise that you enjoy and will be able to stick to long term for extended benefits. However, when it comes to creating a healthy and strong body, weight training is one of the best methods for full body weight loss and can continuously be made more difficult in order to challenge your muscles and create progressive overload. In combination with cardio, weight training can help you to lose fat while gaining muscle, but each option is effective in their own way for improving your overall wellbeing for a strong and healthy body.
