Having high amounts of visceral fat significantly increases your risk of ill health.
That’s why health professionals strongly recommend getting your visceral fat levels under control.
To do this, most recommend a mix of dieting and cardiovascular exercise. Far fewer, however, suggest you lift weights.
One reason they snub weightlifting as a visceral-fat fix is a large-scale study published in 2012 found that weightlifting was ineffective at boosting visceral fat loss.
Since then, scientists have dug deeper and learned lots more about how weightlifting affects visceral fat levels.
Does the most up-to-date science still say weightlifting won’t help you get rid of visceral fat?
Visceral fat is body fat stored in your abdominal cavity around organs such as your liver, pancreas, and intestines.
It differs from subcutaneous fat, which is the pinchable body fat situated under the skin that most people associate with “fat.”
While being overweight in any capacity is unhealthy, research shows visceral fat has more damaging effects on your health than subcutaneous fat.
For instance, higher amounts of visceral fat areassociated with an increased risk of various diseases, including type 2 diabetes, certain cancers, cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome, and dyslipidemia (high blood lipid levels).
Can Weightlifting Boost Visceral Fat Loss?
A 2012 systematic review and meta-analysis conducted by scientists at the University of Sydney concluded that weightlifting is ineffective at reducing visceral fat.
This persuaded most health professionals to discourage weightlifting as a way to lower visceral fat levels. Instead, they typicallyadvocated moderate- and high-intensity cardio.
One ever-present confounder in weight loss research like this, though, is diet.
Some of the studies included in this review and meta-analysis had people maintain a calorie deficit and some didn’t, which muddles the results.
For example, if someone aggressively restricts their calories for weight loss, weightlifting may not significantly increase visceral fat loss (because you can only lose so much fat and visceral fat every day), but that doesn’t necessarily mean weightlifting can’t help someone lose visceral fat under other conditions (such as less rigorous dieting).
To explore this consideration, scientists at the University of Tehran conducted another systematic review and meta-analysis on the effects of weightlifting and visceral fat loss.
After analyzing 34 studies involving a total of 2,285 participants, they found that jacking steel significantly reduced visceral fat in obese, non-obese, middle-aged, and elderly participants who weren’t restricting their calories.
In studies where people were restricting their calories, weightlifting didn’t seem to produce much additional visceral fat loss, but this may be a statistical artifact rather than a genuine observation.
In the two studies primarily responsible for this finding, the participants who only restricted their calories (no weightlifting) started the study with about 50% more visceral fat than those who lifted weights.
Thus, while both groups lost about 30% of their visceral fat, the calorie-restriction-only group lost more pounds of it, which isn’t surprising because they started with more visceral fat, and generally speaking, the more of any kind of fat you have, the easier it is to lose (and conversely, the leaner you are, the more difficult it is to get even leaner).
At any rate, if you want to maximize visceral fat loss (or fat loss in general), doing regular strength training and cardiovascular exercise, restricting calories, and eating sufficient protein is and always will be the winning formula.
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Studies show that compound exercises produce the greatest increases in metabolic rate, muscle mass, and strength, which means they’re the best type of exercise for increasing visceral fat loss.
Heavy weightlifting:Research shows that lifting weights that are 75-to-85% of your one-rep max (weights that you can do 6-to-12 reps with before failing) helps you build more muscle and burn more fat than training with lighter weights.
Progressive overload: The best way to build muscle and thus maximize the fat-burning effects of weightlifting is to strive to add weight or reps to every exercise in every workout. This is known as progressive overload, and it’s the single most important driver of muscle growth.
With that in mind, here are the 10 best weightlifting exercises for weight loss:
And if you want a training program that includes all of these exercises, as well as diet advice to help you lose fat, gain muscle, and get healthy fat, check out my fitness books Bigger Leaner Stronger for men, and Thinner Leaner Stronger for women.
Mike Matthews is the founder of Legion as well as the author of several award-winning fitness books, including Bigger Leaner Stronger, Muscle for Life, and The Shredded Chef.
His simple and science-based approach to building muscle, losing fat, and getting healthy has sold over a million books and helped thousands of people build their best bodies ever, and his work has been featured in many popular outlets including Esquire, Men’s Health, Elle, Women’s Health, Muscle & Strength, and more, as well as on FOX and ABC.
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Free Worldwide Shipping & Returns
Many companies use shipping and handling fees to increase their profit margins, but here at Legion, we hate profits, so our shipping is free!
Okay, so we do dig on profits, but we also go in for happy customers, and free shipping works like gangbusters. So, if you live in the UK or Canada, your order ships free when it’s over $99.
Why the restriction on international orders? Unfortunately, shipping abroad is very expensive, and if we didn’t require a minimum order size, we’d lose a lot of money. But! We're also hustling to improve our international logistics and will be passing our savings along to our international customers.
Also, if you don’t absolutely love our stuff for whatever reason, we don’t request you deliver it to a PO box in the Gobi Desert by carrier pigeon.
We just . . . wait for it . . . give you your money back. No returns. No forms. No nonsense. Holy moo cows.
That means you can say “yes” now and decide later. You really have nothing to lose.
Free Worldwide Shipping & Returns
Many companies use shipping and handling fees to increase their profit margins, but here at Legion, we hate profits, so our shipping is free!
Okay, so we do dig on profits, but we also go in for happy customers, and free shipping works like gangbusters. So, if you’re outside the USA, your order ships free when it’s over $199.
Why the restriction on international orders? Unfortunately, shipping abroad is very expensive, and if we didn’t require a minimum order size, we’d lose a lot of money. But! We're also hustling to improve our international logistics and will be passing our savings along to our international customers.
Also, if you don’t absolutely love our stuff for whatever reason, we don’t request you deliver it to a PO box in the Gobi Desert by carrier pigeon.
We just . . . wait for it . . . give you your money back. No returns. No forms. No nonsense. Holy moo cows.
That means you can say “yes” now and decide later. You really have nothing to lose.
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That’s why all of our supplements are made in America in NSF-certified and FDA-inspected facilities that operate in accordance with the Current Good Manufacturing Practice (cGMP) regulations.
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That’s why we test every ingredient of every supplement we produce for heavy metals, microbes, allergens, and other contaminants and ensure they meet the strict purity standards set by the FDA.
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That’s why all of our supplements are naturally sweetened and flavored and contain no artificial food dyes, fillers, or other unnecessary junk.
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In consideration of the services and/or products offered by Legion Athletics, Inc. (“Legion”) including, but not limited to, nutrition plans, exercise routines and coaching, and in addition to the payment of any fee or charge:
I knowingly and voluntarily enter into this waiver and release of liability and hereby waive any and all rights, claims or causes of action of any kind whatsoever arising out of my use of Legion’s services and/or products, and I hereby release and hold harmless Legion and its consultants, officers, contractors, agents, owners and employees from any and all responsibility, liability, cost and expenses, including for injuries, damages or disorders (physical, metabolic, or otherwise), resulting from my use of Legion’s services and/or products.
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Some popular pre-workouts are all-natural. Some contain the right mix of high-quality ingredients. Some provide clinically effective doses. But only Pulse checks each of these boxes.
Pulse doesn’t just “contain natural ingredients''—every ingredient is naturally sourced from plants and animals. Pulse contains no artificial or synthetic substances of any kind.
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While these types of chemicals may not be as dangerous as some people claim, studies suggest that regular consumption of them may indeed be harmful to our health. And that’s why we don’t put any of them into our products.
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Analyzed for purity and potency in a state-of-the-art ISO 17025 accredited lab by Labdoor™, the gold standard of third-party lab testing.
Analyzed for purity and potency in a state-of-the-art ISO 17025 accredited lab, the gold standard of third-party lab testing.
This product doesn’t just “contain natural ingredients’’—every ingredient is naturally sourced from plants and animals. This product contains no artificial or synthetic substances of any kind.
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