Geschatte leestijd: 7 minutenCan you lose weight with strength training? For many years, there has been a correlation between weight loss and doing cardio training. After all, you burn calories with cardio training, right? There is much less association with doing strength training for your weight management goals. Nowadays, many people still think that the most ideal way to lose weight quickly and burn fat can be achieved by performing long cardio sessions. However, this is not the case. Many people, however, do not want to do strength training or find interval training too intense, which can lead to them quickly losing interest in exercising when they do try it. In that case, it is absolutely not wrong for these people to do long cardio sessions at a low intensity, which they find relatively easy and can therefore sustain for a long time. Although this is not the most ideal way to lose weight, it is always better than deciding to stop altogether.
Strength training can contribute when you want to lose weight and in some cases, it can even lead to better results than doing cardio training alone. In this article, we will delve deeper into the benefits of strength training when you want to lose weight and what the effects are on the body. Additionally, we will make the comparison versus cardio training.
Losing Weight with Strength Training
Actually, losing weight is nothing more than weighing fewer kilograms than the number of kilograms you currently weigh. Often, there is an obsessive fixation on the number indicated by the scale. However, this number does not reflect everything. After all, the number on the scale consists of everything that produces weight in your body: bones, muscles and tendons, organs, fluids, and fat mass. Often, people want to burn fat but they are only focused on weight. If your goal is purely weight loss, then a negative energy balance is the only solution. You can achieve this by adjusting your diet or by increasing your expenditure. Simple as that.
In addition, body weight says nothing about your health. In the past, someone with a lot of belly fat was seen as someone prosperous and had prestige. But belly fat is also a sign of health. Recent published studies show that people with a higher health risk are at higher risk if they have more belly fat and not more body weight. Of course, this can be related, but the focus on total weight alone is incomplete. So, losing weight mainly means reducing fat and not just weighing less. Finally, you want to become healthier and look better. The shape of your body is largely determined by your build and the size of your muscles. Starving yourself will not lead to the preservation of muscle mass.
Fat as Energy
Often you hear in gyms that it is ideal to do strength training before starting a cardio session because the body has already burned a lot of glucose (stored form is glycogen) and thus immediately accesses fat burning. It is true that a large part of the glycogen store has already been depleted, but even when you start with a strength session, your body starts burning fats after about 1-2 minutes. However, for strength exercises, you often need more energy, which is why it is often better to do strength training first (don’t forget the warm-up) and then start the cardio session.
Your body is a clever mechanism and obtains its sources of energy from carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. All these macronutrients provide energy in the form of calories. Your body stores the calories you don’t use as reserves, in the form of fat. So, in fact, your love handles or beer belly are a source of energy for the days when your body really needs it. The latter is important because your body will only really tap into these fat reserves when it does not have access to other sources of energy.
Burning Fat with Strength Training
If you want to tap into the stored reserves as an energy source, you need to make sure you expend more than you intake, in other words, achieve a negative energy balance. How much energy you use daily depends on 3 components, namely:
- Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR)
- The thermic effect of food, i.e., the energy needed to absorb and digest your food
- The thermic effect of labor, the activities you undertake daily, such as work, training but also sleep.
So, the effect of fat burners is mainly seen on the first and second points. These increase your basal metabolic rate and the thermic effect of your food:
The basal metabolic rate is the amount of energy you need to get through the day without doing anything. After all, all bodily processes, your heart rate, and breathing, require energy. This figure depends greatly on your body composition, weight, and age.
The thermic effect of food is the value that arises when consuming your daily food. The stove burns harder when you put wood on it, producing a higher fire and more heat.
Finally, physical labor, which depends greatly on your personal activity level.
Fat Burning Zone
The myth of the fat burning zone has led many people to believe that long cardio sessions at a low intensity are ideal for burning fats. Although at a lower intensity, you burn proportionally more fats than glucose, after a more intense session, you ultimately burn more calories, including more calories from fats.
For example:
20 minutes of walking at 5 km per hour. This could mean that 67% of the energy is supplied by fats and 33% by carbohydrates (glucose). At this speed, you burn 4.8 calories per minute, of which 3.2 (67%) are from fats and 1.6 (33%) from carbohydrates. After 20 minutes, you’ve burned 64 calories from fats and 32 from carbohydrates.
If the same person accelerates this intensity to 10 km per hour for 20 minutes, they will use more carbohydrates as an energy source. In other words, 54% of the energy comes from the burning of carbohydrates and 46% from the burning of fats. However, this higher speed results in burning 9.75 calories per minute. Of which 5.2 are from carbohydrates and 4.48 calories per minute from fats. After 20 minutes, 104 calories are burned from carbohydrates and 90 calories from fats. From this example, it appears that in the same 20 minutes, you’ve burned almost 50% more calories from fats than at a lower intensity. So, never confuse this. At a low intensity, proportionally more energy is derived from fats, but at a higher intensity, you ultimately burn more calories from fats.
Calculating BMR
Using the calculator below, you can roughly calculate your BMR. So, how much should you eat with your BMR and your activity level to maintain your weight?
1. Little or no exercise, desk job — x 1.2
2. Light exercise/sports 1-3 days a week — x 1.375
3. Moderate exercise/sports 3-5 days a week — x 1.55
4. Heavy exercise/sports 6-7 days a week — x 1.725
5. Very heavy exercise/sports & physical job or training twice a day, marathon, football camp, competition, etc. — x 1.9
In the calculator below, you should fill in your weight, height, age, and the number of your activity level. Then press the BMR button corresponding to your gender.
If you want to enter numbers with decimals, use a period (.) instead of a comma, otherwise, the calculator won’t work.
- Weight (kg)
- Height (cm)
- Age
- Activity Level
12345 - Your BMR
- Maintenance
Strength Training for Weight Loss
When it comes to losing weight with strength training, it’s a win-win situation: firstly, strength training increases your basal metabolic rate (BMR). BMR accounts for about 50 to 65 percent of your daily energy expenditure and depends on your body composition. When you engage in strength training, you develop muscle mass. Muscles require energy, even at rest. Your muscle mass determines about 20% of your BMR. So, someone with more muscles burns more calories at rest than someone with fewer muscles. Muscles are considered living tissue and require energy, unlike fat, which is seen as stored energy.
Therefore, it’s important to maintain these muscles because they are part of your fat burning. Suppose you gain 2 kilograms of muscle mass; that’s a 5% increase in your BMR. If your muscle mass decreases, your BMR also decreases.
Secondly, when you engage in strength training while aiming to lose weight, you not only burn energy during the workout but also afterward. This afterburn effect, also known as Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption (EPOC), means that your BMR remains elevated for up to 48 hours after the workout. And did we mention that strength training helps develop muscles that give you a better shape?
In summary, weight loss with strength training can help in 3 ways:
- Strength training increases your BMR by building more muscle mass, which requires energy compared to fats that store energy
- Strength training results in the afterburn effect, which burns energy for up to 48 hours after the workout
- Strength training consumes energy during the workout
Resistance training combined with a cardio session is actually ideal for weight loss. Strength training builds muscle and muscles are metabolically much more active than body fat, resulting in burning more calories at rest. Additionally, your body is metabolically very active after a vigorous strength training session, leading to burning extra calories. A psychological downside is that people may seem to lose weight more slowly because some muscle tissue is being built. Muscle tissue is heavier than fat tissue, making it seem like you’re not losing weight or hardly losing any. Remember that your body composition improves significantly, and the kilograms will eventually come off. Another tip is to measure the circumference of your waist, chest, arms, legs, etc., instead of just looking at weight because then you’ll see more positive results.
Strength Training vs. Cardio for Weight Loss
Finally, let’s discuss the difference between strength training and cardio training. Many fitness instructors advise using cardio training for weight loss at a moderate intensity. This means running or cycling at about 65 to 70 percent of your maximum heart rate. This burns approximately 500 to 600 kcal per hour, more than you would burn in an hour of strength training. However, the amount of calories burned during the strength training session depends on your intensity (rest between sets, weight, etc.). This means that the number of calories burned with strength training in an hour can be at the same level as what you achieve with cardio training.
Secondly, with strength training, you develop and maintain muscles, and as explained above, muscle mass requires energy because it is living tissue. This has a very favorable effect on your BMR.
Finally, strength training yields the afterburn, or EPOC effect. This allows you to burn calories for up to 48 hours after the workout. Although the effect is quite limited.
Remember: cardio training can certainly contribute to weight loss, but if you do too much cardio training and eat too little or incorrectly, it can lead to lower muscle mass, which can adversely affect your metabolism. Therefore, eat well and lose weight with strength training, using cardio training as additional support.
Interval Training
As seen in the example of the fat burning zone, ultimately, you don’t burn more fats by training at a lower intensity. An interval cardio session involves, for example, in a session of 20 minutes, accelerating for 1 minute and then training at a slightly slower pace for 1 minute, although there are many variations possible. This is a very effective way to improve your fitness. It’s also more intense for the body and burns more calories than at a low intensity.
Conclusion: Can You Lose Weight with Strength Training?
So, in conclusion: Do you want to lose weight quickly? Then it may be time to realize that prolonged cardio sessions at low intensity may not be the best way to burn fat. A combination of strength training with a cardio session is more ideal. Especially if the cardio session is also an interval training. However, many people may not find this way of training ideal because it’s too intense. Especially then, these people should continue these longer sessions because this is the best way for them to train. Everyone is different, so find a way that suits you best, enabling you to sustain it for a long time and ultimately achieve the best results.
