Lift Weights to Slim Down

If you are tired of sweating all over every piece of cardio equipment and still not getting results from the scale, then hop off the treadmill and hit the weights.  According to the National Center for Health Statistics, a mere 21 percent of women strength train two or more times a week.   Strength training is the ultimate flab melter. Those two sessions a week can reduce overall body fat by about 3 percentage points in just 10 weeks, even if you don’t cut a single calorie.

That translates to as much as three inches total off your waist and hips. New muscle pays off by proving a long-term boost to your metabolism, which helps keep your body lean and sculpted. Though cardio may burns more initial calories than strength training, pumping iron slashes more overall. A study in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research found that women who completed an hour-long strength-training workout burned an average of 100 more calories in the 24 hours afterward than they did when they hadn’t lifted weights. At three sessions a week, that’s 15,600 calories a year, or about four and a half pounds of fat—without having to move a muscle.

What’s more, increasing that afterburn is as easy as upping the weight on your bar. In a study in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, women burned nearly twice as many calories in the two hours after their workout when they lifted 85 percent of their max load for eight reps than when they did more reps (15) at a lower weight (45 percent of their max).

There’s a longer-term benefit to all that lifting, too: Muscle accounts for about a third of the average woman’s weight, so it has a profound effect on her metabolism, says Kenneth Walsh, director of Boston University School of Medicine’s Whitaker Cardiovascular Institute. Specifically, that effect is to burn extra calories, because muscle, unlike fat, is metabolically active. In English: Muscle chews up calories even when you’re not in the gym. Replace 10 pounds of fat with 10 pounds of lean muscle and you’ll burn an additional 25 to 50 calories a day without even trying.

If you are unsure of how to begin a strength training routine then contact one of our Certified Personal Trainers who can help you develop a safe and effective program.