Lift Weight to Lose Fat

Weight lifting is excellent for building muscles and thereby burning stored fat in the body, which helps you lose the excess flab.

The first step taken by many overweight people after taking the all-important resolution to lose weight is to join a gym. Losing weight with gym activities means burning away the excess fat and building muscles. It is believed by many that combining weight lifting with cardio routines is the perfect way to achieve this.

However, there is misconception regarding the use of these two forms of gym exercises. Most gym-goers believe that weight lifting is good only for muscle building and cardio exercises are required for burning fat in the body. It is true that the combination of these two routines is beneficial, but lifting weights is equally effective in fat burning.

How is it possible?

Lifting weights puts more pressure on muscles. This makes the muscles work harder to handle the extra strain it is subjected to. The muscles will naturally resist this overstrain. When the body is relaxing, the muscles mend the damage inflicted on it and develop further to withstand strain.

Muscle development process requires extra calories. The body makes available these extra calories by burning the stored fat. Thus, indirectly, muscle building leads to burning of more calories. And this happens long after completing the weight training, most probably, while you are asleep.

Again, more muscles need more calories for its maintenance. This may sound farfetched, but is the biological truth. Building muscles and maintaining them will burn extra calories.

Is this all?

Obviously not. The physical exertion caused by lifting weight will need more calories. This happens in the gym, while doing the actual weight lifting. Just like any physical exercise result in expending more calories, as they involve body movements, weight lifting makes the body burn fat deposits to meet the extra energy requirement.

Usually lifting weights is done to build strength, power and for bodybuilding. While strength training, the calorie burnt is less, as the exertion caused on the heart is low. This is not helpful, if you want to use your weight lifting session for calorie burning.

To make your weight lifting sessions more effective in burning calories, you need to pay attention to a few points.

For strength training, heavy weights are used for low reps. Due to the heavier weight involved, movements will be slower and minimal. This is not an ideal situation for burning calories.

By using lighter weights for high reps, the physical activity of the weight lifting will increase. There will be more and faster movements as the resistance will be less. This in turn is helpful in burning body fat.

If you are fed up of the usual set of gym routines and are looking for something new, weight lifting with lighter weights is just right for you. It not only adds variety to your gym workouts, but also is extremely useful in dissipating fat deposits in your body.

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