Ep. #931: Everything You Need to Know About Strength Training for Fat Loss

Hello there, I am Mike Matthews. This is Muscle for Life. Thank you for joining me today for a review of some fundamentals. I wanted to talk about strength training and weight loss. And of course we are going to be talking about weight loss versus training. fat loss, but I’m getting ahead of myself. And the reason I wanted to record this episode is most people think that cardio is the best kind of exercise to lose weight and lose fat.

Those things are different. We’re going to talk about that. But many people think that if you want to lose weight or lose fat effectively, you have to do cardio or at least some cardio. And while it’s true that cardio is great for burning calories and therefore can assist in weight loss and fat loss, strength training is often unfairly criticized as not good for slimming down, not good for losing weight or losing fat.

Not necessarily bad, but just not very beneficial. Many people say that strength training doesn’t burn enough calories to matter. Which isn’t exactly true. Many people say that while strength training can help you build and maintain muscle, that’s something that cardio can’t do. That doesn’t really make weight loss easier.

And that’s not true. And in this podcast, I am going to share with you everything you need to know about strength training for weight loss and how to use strength training effectively. for losing fat as quickly as possible. Before we get into it, what would a perfect protein bar look like to you? Would it have plenty of high quality protein as well as nutritious plant based carbs, fiber, and fats?

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Does it really help? Does it really make a difference? Let’s start by pointing out the difference between losing weight and losing fat, because if somebody feels a little bit too pudgy, they are Probably going to say that they want to lose weight, but what they really mean is they want to lose fat and not muscle, and that’s very important because if losing weight is your only objective, if your sole focus is just decreasing the number that you see on the scale you can just starve yourself and you can do a ton of cardio and you are going to achieve your goal.

You are going to lose weight and you might. Lose it very quickly. But the problem, of course, is that you probably aren’t going to like the way that you look or feel when it is all said and done, because your body weight is composed of both fat and muscle. There are other things, of course, but I’m going to be focusing on just fat and muscle in this talk here.

And that is your body composition as far as this discussion goes, the composition of that weight in terms of fat and muscle. And although you can starve yourself and you can run yourself ragged and quickly lose weight, a lot of that weight you are going to lose will come from muscle and not fat. And as you lose muscle, your body becomes more and more.

Amorphous you get that skinny fat look that so many people are frustrated by and your metabolism also slows down as you lose muscle and that makes future fat gain more likely it makes it harder to maintain your ideal body composition and it also causes your health to take a turn for the worse in several different ways and so focusing solely on weight loss is A mistake, you want to focus on fat loss, and then you want to maintain or gain as much muscle as possible.

And the best way to do all of that begins with strength training, because strength training actually does burn a considerable number of calories, maybe not as many calories as we would wish. It burned three to 600 calories per hour for most people generally. But that’s enough to help you maintain enough of a calorie deficit to lose fat at an encouraging rate.

Ultimately, how quickly you can lose fat without losing muscle has a lot to do with how much fat you have to lose to get to a healthy body composition. For example, if you have Let’s say 15 to maybe 30 pounds of fat to lose to get to the range of 10 to 15 percent body fat. If you’re a man or 20 to maybe 25%, if you are a woman, then you should be aiming for one to two pounds of fat loss per week.

And that would require something around a 3, 500 to 7, 000 calorie deficit. Per week, but if you had a lot more fat to lose, let’s say you had double that amount of fat to lose, you could double that calorie deficit, at least that range and aim for about double two to four pounds of fat loss per week without experiencing really any, let’s say few, if any of the negative side effects associated with dieting.

And so then coming back to strength training and fat loss, while strength training resistance training of any kind, it does burn fewer calories than cardio does per unit of time. If you matched intensities, that doesn’t mean that you should abandon the barbell for the treadmill. That is a mistake because research shows that doing a mix of cardio and strength training is actually the most effective way to lose fat.

It is more effective than just doing cardio or just doing strength training. So in an ideal world, you would do, let’s say anywhere from three to five hours of strength training per week and about half of the amount of time that you spend strength training doing cardio. So a couple of hours of cardio per week, and most of that would be Low to moderate intensity, maybe if you are very cardiovascularly fit, you could get into the moderate to high intensity range, but I would not recommend more than an hour or so of true high intensity, hit high intensity interval training per week because while it does burn a lot of calories and that can boost your fat loss, it also puts a lot of strain on your body and requires a lot more recovery than we can go to the other end of the spectrum, let’s say going for a walk.

But even then, let’s say a five out of 10 difficulty bike ride. And if you are going to do high intensity cardio, I would also recommend that you do not do anything that is high impact because that puts even larger recovery demands on your body. So then that is the most effective way to lose fat, combining the strength training and the cardio, and then because you are.

Doing strength training, you are going to benefit in several unique ways that you would not experience if you were only doing the cardio. For example, the strength training is going to increase your muscle mass unless you are a very experienced weightlifter, but if you are. You probably already know this.

You might not even be listening to this podcast. Maybe you are, and you are just here to brush up on fundamentals, which is a smart move. But anyway, in your case, if you are an experienced weightlifter, you are not going to gain much muscle if any, when you are cutting, but if you are relatively new to strength training, then you can gain muscle while you lose fat.

And while cardio can do a lot to burn fat. It does very little, if anything, to increase the size of your muscles. And the reason I’m not saying it does nothing is there is research that has shown that in untrained individuals, biking can actually result in some lower body muscle growth in a calorie deficit.

But again, if you are trained, even relatively trained, biking is pretty good. Probably not going to make your leg muscles grow. If you have a decent squat, for example, that’s a lot more difficult than biking, especially if you are biking at a moderate intensity. And so what that means then is if you are only doing cardio, you are probably not going to gain any muscle to speak of.

But if you include some strength training, even if it’s just one to three workouts per week, if you are relatively new to all of this. You will gain muscle, and that is going to help in your weight loss efforts because muscle is a much more energy hungry tissue than fat. It’s more metabolically active.

It costs more energy to maintain, and that’s why research shows that we burn about six more calories per day. per pound of muscle that we gain versus just about two calories per day per pound of body fat that we gain. And so then as you are losing fat, you are also gaining muscle, which is speeding up your metabolism, which makes continued fat loss even easier.

It is a virtuous cycle. And studies also show that muscle helps you maintain good metabolic health, which then reduces your risk of many types of diseases. That can negatively impact your overall health and being, but also your body composition. And finally, research shows that more muscular people live longer and have a lower risk of a variety of other lifestyle diseases like heart disease, osteoporosis, and type 2 diabetes.

Total lean mass is associated with all cause mortality, meaning. That what researchers have found is as people have more and more lean mass, their chances of dying from anything and everything get lower. Now just to clarify something regarding increasing your metabolism or boosting your metabolism, specifically when you gain muscle, your resting metabolic rate decreases.

Goes up and that is the number of calories that your body burns at rest. And that’s worth calling out because that’s energy that your body is burning, that you don’t have to move for. And of course, the more calories your body burns at rest, the easier it is to maintain a calorie deficit. And then when you’re done dieting, the easier it is to maintain your ideal body composition.

And many studies have shown that strength training is a highly effective way at increasing resting metabolic rate. In fact, it is the most effective way that is natural and safe. Another interesting benefit of strength training and fat loss is it actually helps you burn more fat. It makes your body better at burning fat because when we train our muscles, they release a special type of cell into our blood called extracellular Vesicles and research shows that when these extracellular vesicles leave our muscles, they carry with them strands of genetic material called mir1, M I R dash one or hyphen one, which they then deposit in neighboring fat cells.

And when Mer 1 is in muscle tissue. It hinders muscle growth. But when it is in fat cells, it speeds up fat burning. So what the weightlifting is doing is it’s causing a subtle shift in the expression of certain genes that then accelerate muscle growth. Because remember, these compounds, they’re leaving the muscles where they Hinder muscle growth, and then they’re going into the fat cells where they can accelerate fat burning.

Okay, so that’s enough theory. I think for this episode, let’s shift gears and now talk practical implementation. Let’s talk about exercises and programming. What’s the best way to do that? To maximize the fat burning effects and the health effects. Everything that we just discussed in your strength training.

Well, a few things you need to focus on compound exercises, and those are exercises that target multiple muscle groups and involve multiple joints. Like the squat or deadlift and any variation of course of these movements, but just examples, a bench press overhead press and studies show that compound exercises produce the greatest increase in metabolic rate, muscle mass and strength.

And of course that means that those are the best types of exercises to do for speeding up your fat loss. Now, of course, you don’t. only need to do compound exercises. You can do a combination of compound and isolation exercises target one muscle group and usually only involve one joint.

But in your workouts, you want to start with your compound exercises, your hardest exercises, get those done, then do your isolation exercises. And so in a pull workout, for example, you might start with a deadlift and then you might do a barbell row. And then you might do a biceps curl, for example, now, another important factor in using strength training for maximum fat losses.

You want to lift heavy weights because research shows that lifting weights that are in the range of 75 to 85 percent of your one rep max. So it’s going to be in the range of 10 to 4 reps per set with maybe one or two good reps left pretty close to muscular failure. That is going to help you build more muscle and burn more fat than training with lighter weights than doing, say, 15, 20, 25, 30 plus reps per set.

You also need to make sure that you are progressively overloading. Your muscles, and that means that you need to be generating larger and larger amounts of tension in your muscle over time, because that is the primary mechanical driver of muscle growth, and the most effective way to accomplish that, especially when you are relatively new to all of this is adding weight to the bar is getting stronger.

To the dumbbells and to the machines as well. And in the beginning, when you are brand new, you can add weight to exercises literally every week for at least a few months before you have to slow down, quote unquote, to maybe adding every other week or every third week. And even when you are an experienced weightlifter, adding weight to exercises, getting stronger is still the most effective way.

To get bigger, it just is much harder. And so with those points in mind, here are 10 of my favorite strength training exercises for weight loss and for fat loss and muscle gain, the barbell back squat, the barbell front squat. The Romanian deadlift, the barbell deadlift, which you can do as a conventional deadlift.

You can do it sumo style. You can also do the trap bar deadlift. You can even do the rack pull. If you can’t do any of the variations I just mentioned, maybe because of back pain, the rack pull is a great variation of the deadlift. Then we have the pull up. The chin up is also Worth mentioning the barbell row and dumbbell row.

I’m going to put those together the barbell and dumbbell bench press the barbell and dumbbell incline bench press and the barbell overhead press and then the dumbbell shoulder press the dumbbell variation of that. And so then if you were to take those exercises and put together some workouts that started with at least one of those, maybe contained two of those with relatively heavy weights, again, let’s say anything from 10 can even go up to 12 reps to down to maybe four reps per set.

And you’re taking each of those sets close to muscular failure. You don’t have to do more than Maybe nine or 10 maximum 12 sets per workout. Do that a few times per week, or get in there and maybe not do the same workout a few times per week. It depends how you want to break it up, but getting a few strength training workouts per week, and then do a few sessions of cardio per week.

If you combine that with proper dieting, which of course just means a proper calorie deficit, something around 20 to 25 percent works for most people. So eating 75 to 80 percent of the calories that you burn. Burn every day and then eating enough protein, which is around one gram per pound of body weight for most people.

And in the case of people who are very overweight, something close to maybe 35 to 40 percent of daily calories. And if you do those things. You are going to lose weight. You are going to lose fat. You are going to be replacing fat. At least that’s how you’re going to experience it. Of course, physiologically, you can’t swap fat for muscle, but you’re going to see areas of your body getting leaner.

So you’re going to be losing fat, and you’re going to see muscle definition coming into those places as well. So it’s going to look like you are replacing fat with muscle, and you can do that For as long as you need to diet to reach your target body composition, which for most guys, they are, I would say, most happy in my experience in the range of 10 to 15 percent body fat and most gals 20 to 25 percent body fat.

And if you are not sure what those ranges look like, go over to legionathletics. com, search for body fat percentage, and you will find an article called. How to calculate body fat percentage. And in that article, you will learn about different methods, pros and cons. And you will also find some images that show you what different body fat percentage ranges look like in both men and women. I hope you liked this episode. I hope you found it helpful. And if you did. Subscribe to the show because it makes sure that you don’t miss new episodes. And it also helps me because it increases the rankings of the show a little bit, which of course then makes it a little bit more easily found by other people who may like it just as much as you.

And if you didn’t like something about this episode or about the show in general, or if you have. Ideas or suggestions or just feedback to share, shoot me an email Mike at muscle for life. com muscle F O R life. com. And let me know what I could do better or just what your thoughts are about maybe what you’d like to see me do in the future.

I read everything myself. I’m always looking for new ideas and constructive feedback. So thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.