Strength Training Can Help you Lose Weight and More
This is the time of year when people tend to make efforts to change their eating habits in order to lose weight. While dieting can have an effect on weight loss, you can even further reduce body fat by combining strength training with reducing calories through dieting.
A small study published in the International Journal of Sports in January 2018 concluded that people who combined whole-body resistance training and dieting over four months lost fat while improving muscle mass.
Strength training can help you lose weight and keep it off by building muscle tissue. The more muscle you have, the higher your metabolic rate. More muscle also helps your body burn more fat than muscle, which is important if you want to lose weight and maintain strength. So when you build muscle, you speed up your metabolism and burn more fat while exercising. The faster your body burns calories, the more calories you burn each day. Since the formula for losing weight is to burn more calories than you expend, increasing the calories you burn will help you lose weight (assuming you're not adding calories). To maximize the benefits of strength training, try doing one-hour strength training sessions three to five times a week. Unlike cardio, you shouldn't be doing strength training every day. A good rule is to rest for at least one day between training days. So if you lift on Monday and Tuesday, rest on Wednesday, then return to the gym for more strength training on Thursday and Friday.
Strength training can improve your endurance
Human performance can be improved with prolonged physical training, whether it is endurance training or strength training. The ability to adapt through physical activity enables individuals to perform at their sporting events and/or maintain optimal physical conditioning throughout their lifespan. Our constant quest to understand how to prescribe exercise to maximize health and/or performance outcomes means that our knowledge of the adaptations that occur as a result of exercise is constantly evolving.
Strength training has been shown to improve short-term (30 min) performance in endurance athletes (Aagaard & Andersen, 2010). These results were consistent in both untrained and trained elite athletes. It is important to emphasize progress in well-trained athletes, as these populations typically experience minimal progress due to years of training and mastery of their chosen sport. Furthermore, these results have been reproduced in various endurance sports such as running (Sedano, Marin, Cuadrado, & Redondo, 2013), rowing (Izquierdo-Gabarren et al., 2010) and cycling (Ronnestad, Hansen, & Ellefsen, 2015).
Strength training can help you tone your body
If your goal is strength training to achieve maximum strength, such as in bodybuilding, for example, you should focus on increasing the weight and reducing the number of repetitions ("reps"), according to the American Council on Exercise -- adding weight to increase your workout strength. If you're strength training for endurance—for example, the kind of resistance training that distance runners do to protect their knees, ankles, and other joints—you should focus on lighter weights and more reps.
But remember, strength training isn't just about lifting weights, building muscle, and looking great. It's about vitality, energy, confidence, and independence. Once you experience the benefits of strength training, you'll understand how strength training can revolutionize your body, from the inside out.
Sources
1.https://www.everydayhealth.com/fitness/add-strength-training-to-your-workout.aspx
3.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5983157/
6.https://www.lifehack.org/322582/how-strength-training-can-completely-transform-your-body
