Strength Training – The Key to keeping weight off…

When you have a recipe for a meal (let’s say a Pad Thai), you need to follow the recipe or at least use all the ingredients. If you leave out the rice, noodles or the peanuts, it’s not going to be what you want. You will get a different result.

It’s the same with fat loss, you need to follow a recipe, in this case being:

• Correct exercise programming,
• The right nutrition protocols
• Speeding up that “slow metabolism”.

“But how do you speed up your metabolism?”

There are plenty of little ways to speed up your metabolism. For example, having an espresso shot will increase your metabolism for a few hours due to it increasing your heart rate. But what most people do is rely on coffee, the chilli in their food or the eating every 3 hours and doing hours of cardio. Little do they know that this is not the best way to keeping the weight off!

The secret is actually Strength Training. Quite simply, lifting weights in the gym will, in time, build muscle. Having more muscle increases your RMR (Resting Metabolic Rate). RMR is the amount of calories you would burn if you did nothing all day (the amount of calories needed for organ function, maintain weight etc.) At rest, having more muscle will increase that calorie burn by a small amount. BUT when you are training, moving, working, cleaning, playing with the kids etc you will burn way more calories than any other green tea or “metabolism boosting” pill.

Having muscle on your body will be the most effective fat burning solution for you. I’m not saying you need to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, but any increase in muscle mass from even 1kg upwards will have huge benefits for your metabolism. So it’s not that cardio, chilli, coffee etc won’t help, they most definitely do. But couple that with strength training and you’ll have a recipe for fat loss! Gone are the days of going on a calorie restricted diet, running every day, losing a total of 8kgs in 5 weeks (3kgs of fat, 5kgs of muscle) , lowering your metabolism and digging yourself a huge hole and wondering why you gain the weight back again. You have thrown only half the ingredients in the pan and expected a delicious Pad Thai as a result.

If you don’t know where to start, we would recommend the first step being attendance at our Strength & Conditioning class we run multiple times a week. You will learn correct form and how to lift weights in the right way. Next week we’ll be discussing a hot topic since the explosion of the popularity of the bootie: Squats.

All4Fitness – Making a difference