Fat Burning and Weight Lifting

By adding weight lifting to your exercise program, you can dramatically increase your body's fat burning potential.  By adding more lean mass to your body, you burn more calories since muscle require more energy than fat.  And with the added muscle, you help to increase your body's metabolism. 

Weight lifting is an underused resource when it comes to burning fat.  Many people unfortunately avoid lifting weights as a mean to burn fat.  Reason range from believing that the activity is going to be strenuous to not wanting to get bulky. 

Some of the benefits that you get from weight lifting are increase muscle density which aides in burning fat.  You have more energy.  Weight lifting increases your metabolism. 

But what are the desired effects that we want on our muscles while lifting weights? We want to overload the muscles to spur muscle growth.  This is known as the Overload Principle.  With regular exercise at higher than normal intensities, you begin to overload your muscles producing physiologic changes in them.  This forces your body to adapt and deal with the change by adding muscle. 

In fact, any type of weight lifting that is out of your normal routine will generate this effect even if it is something as simple as lifting a heavy book several repetitions.  Of course after your body adapts you will need to increase the intensity to see further benefits. 

And even though lifting a heavy book would produce some physiologic change in our body, we want that is easier to handle and will produce more effective change.  In this case you have several options.  I'm just going to mention two of the most prevalent which are free weights and machines. 

Free weights can range from the small hands all the way up to the weights used for bench pressing.  The advantage of free weights are that can simulate more natural motion and can target muscle groups better when used correctly.  The are also more cost effective then most exercise machines.  With several pair of hand weights, you create an effective workout program at home.  The disadvantage is that you can hurt yourself if used improperly especially if you're using heavy free weights for your bench press. 

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