Lifting Weights: How Much Does It Really Help Fat Loss?

Does Lifting Weights Help weight loss?

Lifting weights may help with weight loss, but not for the reasons you probably think.

Lifting weights in the gym can certainly elevate your heart rate if you’re pushing your sets close to failure, most notably on squats, deadlifts, or other large compound movements (and even isolation exercises toward the end of a session).

The effect of these sessions on caloric burn is often overstated. According to this study, which measured the caloric burn of several types of exercises including: treadmill, cycling, a hydraulic system, and resistance training. Lifting weights under proper conditions resulted in burning about “8.83 ± 1.55” calories per minute. These sound like pretty stellar numbers at face value. However, it would be misleading to take this at face value. So the question we must ask is:

“How many calories per minute do you burn while sedentary?”

According to this study that was designed to measure the difference of caloric expenditure between sitting and standing, you burn ~0.85-1.85cal/minute while sitting around. The gap is likely just due to differences in body mass. Either way, we’ll assume we burn about 1.5 cal/minute while sitting around. This means adding in exercise is only really burning 5.5-8.5 calories per minute! The amount its burning will be largely influenced by intensity of the workout and your own body composition. It takes less calories to move someone who is 100lbs compared to someone who is 200lbs!

So, then, how many calories are we burning during a workout of 30-45 minutes of intense resistance training?

About 150-225 calories per session.

In another words, a really solid piece of toast, or a single poptart.

That’s not to say it won’t help, it just shouldn’t be the only thing you utilize. As the saying goes, you can’t outwork a bad diet.

If you want to lose weight, you need to focus primarily on diet and creating a calorie deficit by eliminating food (I’ve written about that here and here fairly extensively).

So, if resistance training doesn’t burn a ton of calories, what’s the point?

Resistance training improves body composition and health.

The benefit of lifting weights while losing weight is that you either build muscle mass or help retain it. If you’re a beginner, you get the best of both worlds. You can add a lot of muscle while losing weight. You have to train hard, eat a high protein diet, and prioritize getting 7-9 hours of sleep per night.

Here’s another article that I wrote recently. Resistance training carries all the same benefits of cardio when it comes to protecting against CVD and type 2 diabetes. Here’s an interesting study on T2D and resistance training.

So why should you include resistance training to any weight loss plan?

1. Your metabolic health improves.
2. You can gain lean muscle mass.
3. You can improve your cardiovascular fitness.
4. Your strength, bone density, and coordination will all improve.
5. You’ll get a taste of those sweet post-workout endorphins.
6. Literally a million minute reasons follow after endorphins.
7. You’ll experience minor improvements to your caloric expenditure.

Resistance training improves absolutely everything around losing weight, but does not contribute greatly to the act of losing fat mass itself. But by building muscle and losing fat, you’ll improve your BMI/body fat percentage or whatever health marker you’re using.

Lift weights, lift them often, and lift heavy. You’ll thank yourself when you’re still a badass in your 80s.