Benefits of weight training or weight lifting in losing weight

[Linda]

It's always been a controversial question that whether or not weight lifting helps us lose weight? It's a proven fact that cardiovascular activities like walking, swimming, playing, jumping etc and cardio workouts helps you lose weight by increasing your heart rate which in turn increases your metabolic activity leading towards burning more calories. Similarly another way to boost metabolism is to have muscles. More muscle tissues keep you metabolically active even if your body is not doing anything. And for more muscles weight training is the best option. Therefore it is clear that weight lifting helps you lose weight.

A simple weight lose formula can answer all your relevant questions. The formula suggests that if your body consumes more calories than what you take in, you will automatically reduce in size. This is due to the fact that the rest of the energy requirement will be fulfilled by using the stored energy within your body in the form of fats. Different weight loss methods facilitate our body differently when it comes to losing weight. Following paragraphs discuss how weight training / lifting contributes towards losing weight.

Some trainers claim that weight training helps us in burning 50 calories a day but this is a mere exaggeration. No doubt weight training helps but the true results can only be achieved if you are consistent because regular work outs let you build muscles and one pound of muscle can help burn around 8 to 15 calories per day. One must add on weights slowly to their regular weights to get much better health results and more calories burning per day.

Weight training is body-parts specific this means that we lift weights to strengthen a specific part of the body therefore burning calories overall is relatively a slow process by weight lifting and much better weight loss results can be achieved from aerobic or cardiovascular activities. But there are certain specific exercises which if done properly can lead to weight loss by weight lifting and are as follows:

1. Add more lower-body targeted exercises to lose weight by weight lifting such as squats and lunges.
2. Adding circuit-style routines to your weight workouts help you burns more calories.
3. Combine cardio with weight lifting like add more jumping jacks and jogging portion to your weight lifting session to get maximum weigh loss benefits.
4. Be consistent and add on weights slowly and regularly. More intense weight workouts help you burn calories by building muscles even if you are not performing exercise.

Concluding I would like to add that no doubt weight training has many health benefits and indeed it plays a vital role in keeping you fit and healthy and it also helps strengthen our body parts but when it comes weight loss, weight training helps but not too much as other weight loss methods probably can. It helps you build muscles which in turn can expedite your metabolic activity causing you lose weight but there are other better options than weight training if your aim is to lose weight.