Strength Training for Fat Loss

Cardio alone won’t guarantee a six-pack and a firm butt. Learn how to lose that stubborn fat and sculpt your body.

Most of us want to lose a little bit of body fat, and we’ve been conditioned into believing that cardiovascular exercise is the best way: the harder we go, the more calories we burn. However, while we’re exercising we should not obsess over how many calories we are expending. Instead, our goal should be to train our bodies to burn a higher number of calories all the time, even when we are at rest.

When you work out, your body’s metabolic rate (a measure of its efficiency in maintaining basic life processes like breathing, digestion, etc) raises. When you finish training, there is a flow-on effect, where your metabolism — your body’s engine room — stays elevated for some time. Over a period of time as you train regularly, you progressively condition your metabolism to operate faster, even when you are not working out, which means you burn more calories continually and keep body fat under control.

Running will make you sweat and it is valuable cardiovascular exercise, but it expends a disappointing 75 calories per kilometer on average and doesn’t stimulate significant muscle development. Strength training doesn’t burn a high amount of calories either while you’re performing it. But when you push a muscle to failure, you set off a cascade of physiological changes. As the muscle recovers over the next two days — when you feel like an old person, temporarily — it will thicken, and the new muscle tissue will demand sustenance (i.e., a higher expenditure of calories). By the time you add on three pounds, or a mere 1.37 kg of lean muscle, your body would have required an extra 9000 calories a month just to break even.

Alongside this, if you can hold your diet steady you will be vaporizing body fat. Yes, I can hear you thinking, “I have to put on weight in the form of muscle to lose fat?” Well, kind of. But don’t forget to factor in your 1.37kg of muscle, which takes some time to build, but will be demanding your metabolism to work faster and virtually eat away at the fat. So, in effect, you add muscle to take away fat. Muscle weighs heavier than fat, and in theory, if you gain muscle and stay the same on the scale it suggests that you have lost significantly more fat than the muscle you have gained.

In essence, a greater muscle mass equates which a higher metabolism, which utilizes more calories, and more effectively uses fat as a fuel source. Simply put, firm, shapely muscles that give us the tone and contour we so eagerly desire, are muscles that are strong and developed. But you may feel that you are doing all this hard work to strengthen your muscles and yet you still can’t quite see the shape you want. That’s because fat sits directly under the skin and on top of the muscle.

What happens first in the physiological process is that the muscle gets stronger and firmer underneath, but you don’t get to see it straightaway, even though you will feel more robust. This growth then kicks off the rest of the process, but you have to be patient and trust that over time, as you strengthen the muscles all over your body, they will begin to require more calories to operate therefore will naturally metabolize fat faster.

As the fat begins to melt away, you will be left without visibly lean and shapely muscle. And no, we are not talking Mr. and Miss Universe, but the kind of body that looks great in a strapless dress or a singlet and shorts, a body that is evenly proportioned and for ladies a body that will turn heads (not only men’s but other envious women who may not be privy to your training secret).

Essentially, if you want to change the shape of your body, you have to engage in some sort of strength or resistance training. We’ve all heard of people who complain that they cut down on all luxuries in their diet and do so much cardio, and yet after an initial drop in body weight (where they probably lose more muscle than fat), the basic shape and proportion of their body does not really change at all.

Surprising the body with new training variables is also very important. Routines need to be refigured regularly to “trick” the body out of its natural inclination to adapt. If you constantly repeat the same workout, your brain basically switches your body over to “cruise control”.

That aside, you may still be thinking: “if I want to trim down my hips and butt, and flatten my tummy, I’ll do hundreds of leg lifts and crunch sit ups till I burst. Of course, it is tempting to feel that by torturing your hips and butt till they ache you are burning fat away from the vicinity to reveal your preferred shape. And there is benefit — strengthening the muscles — in doing these exercises. but localized training on specific trouble spots has been proven not to work for fat loss.

Fat comes off all over the body, proportionally, as we train regularly. And sadly, it appears that the places we desire most to see it gone are the most reluctant to let it go. However, this is only a perception on our part, because, of course, we hold comparatively more fat in those areas and it is simply going to take a little longer to shift than from areas where less fat is stored.

The answer is to persevere!

Effective training is about optimizing body composition (more muscle, less fat), elevating metabolic rate by having greater muscle density, which will in turn utilize more calories and keep body fat under control. To combine strength training with a sensible cardio regime is ideal, as it is vital to your health to exercise your heart and lungs — your heart, in fact is a muscle. This balance of cardio and strength training will keep you fit.

As with anything, moderation is the key, since an overdose of cardio training can interfere with the benefits to be derived from your weights work. After a certain point with intensive cardio training, the muscles can actually begin to deplete, so this spells trouble in relation to what was explained earlier: you need to maintain muscle to burn more calories and manage body fat.