Do heavy weights make you lose weight

When Ellen Zwiefel started putting on weight after the birth of her second child, she did what a lot of people do: She tried to run it off. Four or five times a week, she laced up her running shoes and ran five miles, nonstop. But the scale refused to budge. Months of heroic effort, however, did little to reshape her body.

But rather than give up, Zwiefel sought help. Instead of low-intensity, repetitive exercise sessions on treadmills and ellipticals, she began doing shorter, more intense workouts with weights that were never the same from one day to the next. Many gym-goers — and even some health and fitness professionals — still believe that strength training is only for people who want to gain weight in the form of shirt-stretching muscles, and that long-duration exercise like running and cycling is the fastest way to lose fat.

In-the-know trainers like Stella, however, believe otherwise.

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Both their real-life experience and the latest fitness research suggest that low- to moderate-intensity aerobic exercise, while beneficial, is not the fastest route to leanness and overall health that many people believe it is. The real key to fat loss is high-intensity exercise, especially strength training — with real weights, real sweat and real effort. The results may have little to do with what the scale tells you. Your weight may go down, stay the same, or even go up a bit. Your shape , however, will change dramatically, says Stella. Aerobic activity is great for your heart and lungs. For many, it can be a meditative way to clear the mind, blow off stress and get in touch with nature.

But as a tool for getting leaner, aerobic exercise by itself is a mediocre strategy. Stay in a calorie-deprived state long enough, and your body begins to burn through its own tissues for fuel. The number on the scale goes down. You can make that number drop through aerobic exercise and calorie restriction.

And losing muscle mass can sabotage your weight-loss efforts. Muscle contraction is a primary engine of fat loss, explains Stella: The more muscle mass you have to contract, the more calories you can burn. In addition, strength-training workouts that take large muscle groups to a state of burn will increase the release of hormones that aid in reducing body fat. So anyone who wants to lose fat should make every effort to hang on to, and even gain, as much lean muscle mass as possible. The best way to do that is resistance training, which will help you hold on to your muscle tissue while you lose fat.

Stella recommends a gram of protein per pound of lean body weight per day, which requires an individual to know his or her body fat percentage. In turn, this extra muscle keeps your metabolism humming, even as restricted food intake threatens to slow it down. Numerous studies have demonstrated conclusively that strength training, in conjunction with good nutrition, burns fat much more effectively than dieting alone and dieting in conjunction with aerobic exercise. What no study has shown yet is exactly how.

Compare the energy costs of the two activities during a workout session, as many studies have done in the past, and aerobic activity appears to burn more fat, which may explain why many health and fitness professionals still recommend it. Way ahead. Several factors contribute to this.

An exerciser consumes additional oxygen in the hours and days following a strength-training session a phenomenon known as excess post-exercise oxygen consumption, or EPOC , and that accounts for some of the difference. Simply put, you burn more calories and keep your metabolism elevated when you use more oxygen.

But, as with many questions in the relatively young field of exercise science, a complete answer remains elusive. Absent a full explanation, experts like Alwyn Cosgrove, MS, CSCS, posit that intense anaerobic exercise causes an unusual amount of metabolic perturbation — breakdown in muscle and other tissues — from which the body must scramble to recover. Cosgrove, co-owner of Results Fitness in Newhall, Calif. This spike, combined with the large amounts of fat and calories burned by the activity itself, probably accounts for the remarkably high energy expenditure of these types of activity.

One reason: Regular, intense resistance training can have a dramatic effect on your endocrine or hormonal system, which manages energy, mood and other components of well-being. But, keep in mind that you are going to have to keep doing those long cardio sessions. Time will likely become a big factor with this one, and boredom could start to play a role over time, too. While a weight-training session may not burn as many calories per minute during the actual workout although that can depend on how intense the weight lifting is , the overall calorie-burning benefits you receive from it typically outweigh those of cardio.

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One point does have to go to cardio for health benefits. Obviously strength training has health benefits as well, but cardio training has a bigger influence on cardiovascular health, since your heart and lungs work harder for longer when you do it. So, while you likely shouldn't entirely eliminate cardio from your fat-loss training program, you should be putting forth good effort toward weight training as well.

Overlooking this form of exercise while playing the fat-loss game is a big mistake that's going to hurt your progress.

It's time to break free from the thinking that cardio equates to fat loss and weight training equates to building muscle and weight gain. It's simply not as clear cut as that. While doing cardio can help your fat-loss goals, in a lot of ways weight training is more effective and will also give you a more toned body shape. While lifting weights can help you build muscle mass, that muscle mass will in turn help you lose fat mass. And if you just want to lose fat and don't want to get hugely muscular, don't worry, that takes a lot of concentrated effort and won't happen just by showing up to the weight room a few times a week.

Shannon Clark is a freelance health and fitness writer located in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

View all articles by this author. Fat Loss Training Wars Workout. Bent Over Barbell Row. What comes with BodyFit? Instructional Videos Don't risk doing a workout improperly! How-to Images View our enormous library of workout photos and see exactly how each exercise should be done before you give it a shot.

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Step-by-Step Instructions Quickly read through our step-by-step directions to ensure you're doing each workout correctly the first time, every time. This term refers to how long your metabolism is elevated after exercise, enabling you to burn fat long after finishing your workout. Studies show that a well-designed strength program can elevate your EPOC or metabolism for up to 38 hours after the workout. Another study found that when alternating weight training and cardio days, you are more likely to burn twice as much fat than if you were to perform cardio training only.



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An example of this type of routine would be:. The author of this article, Mehmet Edip is an internationally published fitness model and writer, actor and competitive athlete. Be sure to follow him on Twitter : and to like his Facebook fanpage :.