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How often should you do strength training to lose weight? In this episode we’ll talk
about underlying mechanisms for weight loss and how strength training can help to lose weight.
So how often do I need to do strength training if I want to lose weight? Basically,
we need to understand the mechanism how we lose weight. If we expend more energy than
we take in, we lose weight, if we take in more energy in than we use, we gain weight.
So how can strength training help? First and foremost, if we are doing any kind of strength
training, it will help us grow our muscles which will lead to more energy consumption
at rest. Another benefit of strength training is that it changes the hormonal environment;
we have less stress hormones and more hormones that promote fat lost. So the first mechanism
is, we can increase our strength and we can increase our muscle tissue so that we use
more energy at rest. Another mechanism we can do is that we increase the energy expenditure
during training, so if we doing any form of training we kind of increase the energy consumption
during that moment. So if we now do a strength training with long rest period, that might
not have the desired effect in terms of a lot of energy consumption within a session.
If we want to have a lot of energy consumption within the session, we need to keep the rest
short, so that the heart rate stays at a higher level. That’s the second mechanism where
we can increase energy consumption within a session. So if we want to increase our resting
metabolic rate we have to look at the first mechanism, therefore we need to do our strength
training relative high intensity, seventy percent of the 1RM or higher, for ten or less
repetitions. The reason why we do this is first and foremost it builds muscle but also
it increases testosterone production and growth hormone production. If we are interested in
increasing the energy expended during the session, then we basically need to reduce
the rest periods between the sets. So we do an exercise and we go relatively quickly to
the next exercise, this would have higher energy consumption within a session but does
not necessarily lead to a higher metabolic resting rate.