Effective Training Method For Weight Loss

2-4 sessions of resistance training per week is important habit to keep our health and physical fitness going.  Resistance training will be useful for those who want to lose body fat.  In this article, we’ll look at why resistance training is important for fat loss and what are some key factors to keep in mind.

Muscle Loss = Slow Metabolism

When going through weight loss, it is important to manage your caloric intake and be mindful of what you are eating and drinking.  While dietary restrictions are necessary, we also must focus on maintaining or gaining muscles. 

Issue that we see in those who have lost weight just through diet is not being able to sustain the weight that they have lost.  Although there are several factors involved in this issue, one of the key factors is muscle loss. Although there may be some muscle loss during weight loss, losing muscles to attain weight loss goal is a problem because metabolic rate drops as we lose muscles.

Maintaining muscle mass for the body is very energy inefficient, meaning more energy or calorie is needed to maintain the muscles.  If the muscle is not being used because of lack of physical activities or extreme dietary restriction, then the body will choose not to keep the muscles so that body can reserve the energy for survival needs.

As mentioned earlier, when muscle loss happens, our metabolic rate drops.  This means while your body could handle 2000 calories worth of work per day 6 months ago, now it can only handle 1200 calories worth of work.  This may sound drastic, but this happens, and it is common reason why people who have sedentary lifestyle have tough times losing weight. This is also a common issue for those who have succeeded in weight loss but bounce back.

Understanding Cause of Weight Gain

Weight gain or fat gain happens because of several factors. 

One is energy balance between consumption and expenditure is leaning towards consumption. This is information that we hear all the time.  Although this is not the only issue, however, it is a cause of weight gain.

Second is not being able to cope with stress.  With economy, work, relationships and so on, we are living in a very high stress environment.  When stress level is too high and unmanaged for too long, due to the constant elevation of stress hormones called cortisol, our body secretes insulin to bring the cortisol level down.  To lower body we crave sugar, which leads to the first problem.  This becomes a very important factor to keep in mind, especially when you have decided to add strength training to your daily habits.

Third is losing muscle mass and strength.  With lack of physical activities, muscle loss can be observed as early as 35 years old.  Because of muscle loss, activity level declined because metabolism drops.  Interestingly, body recognizes the capacity and place halt to what physical exertion you are attempting. Hence, many feel stiff bending over, squatting, lifting objects above their head and feel exhausted going up the stairs.  This is all due to muscle loss, which leads to energy consumption and exertion becoming lower.  Even when you can still eat a lot, majority of calories will not be used and stored as fat.

Training Method for Fat Loss

Even without all the information above, many of you may already know that strength training or resistance training is important not only for weight loss but for our overall health.  The question comes, where should you start and what should you do.  With so much information that is out there, there are two common denominators that you should be focusing on.  Those are energy demand and low impact/high reps.

Energy demand refers to how much energy you can utilize during your sessions, whether it is 30 or 60 minutes.  So rather than choosing exercise like biceps curls or plank, though these are good exercises, it is better to choose exercises that use more body parts, such as squat, deadlift, lunges, push-ups, pull ups, lat pulldown, and so forth. 

Low impact/ high reps refer to less amount of weight and high number of repetitions in each exercise.  Primary reason is to be able to move continuously without long duration of break.  When you do high impact, it takes longer to recover, which becomes inefficient if your focus is on energy expenditure.  You will still need load to stimulate your muscles; however, you do not need heavy weight.  Even with 5-10lb of load, when you do 15-20 repetitions in perfect form you will stimulate your muscles enough for growth.

Another reason for low impact/high reps being ideal training method for weight loss is able to avoid excess elevation of your cortisol.  Remember, one of the causes of weight gain, especially around the mid-section, is stress hormones or cortisol.  On top of it, you are restricting your caloric intake so it is vital to manage the exercise intensity and volume or body may not recover properly, which leads to "I'm exercising but not able to lose weight". Therefore, low intensity or resistance with higher repetitions per exercise is more manageable than high intensity or resistance.

Building Muscle with Low Intensity/ High Rep Methods

In this article we are focusing on building muscle while losing fat. With that in mind let's see how the low intensity/ high rep methods looks like.

The way I organize the training is gather 4-8 exercises with 10-15 repetitions of each exercises. If you can perform 15 repetitions in any exercise with proper technique, then increase the weight and reduce the repetitions to 10.

There will be resting period of 30-120 seconds between each exercises. Duration of recovery may vary based on your condition. This is to train your heartrate to recover between exercise, which can train your body to physiologically manage stress. You can start with 120 seconds then shorten as your condition improves.

Choice of exercises are focusing on compound exercises, which means exercise that involves multiple joints. For example, biceps curl is single joint (elbow) exercise where as lat pulldown involves multiple joints (elbow, shoulder, shoulder blade).

Sample routine may look like:

10 Squat

60 second rest

10 Push Ups

60 second rest

10 Jumping Jacks

60 second rest

10 Lat Pulldown

60 second rest

Repeat 3 times

If 1 repetition of each exercise takes 1 second, then with 4 compound exercise it will take 40 seconds. With 60 seconds rest in between exercises, it takes 280 seconds to complete the set. When you perform 3 times then this will be 840 seconds or 14 minutes. Based on your condition resting duration can be adjusted.

Frequency of Resistance Training for Weight Loss

Frequency or number of training sessions per week may vary based on your recovery. If you are not sure, it may be good to start with 2 30 minutes sessions per week with 48 hours of rest day in between. Because the goal is weight loss, rest day or non-training day should be dedicated towards 20-30 minutes of easy walk.

Once you get used to recover from the 2 training sessions per week, then you can add 1 more session per week then increase 30 minutes session to 60 minutes.

What Does Recovery Mean?

So what is recovery. Recovery is where your body adapts to your training session and where muscle and strength growth happens. When you train too much too soon, this recovery may take more than 48 hours and impact your training frequency, which can also impact your results.

Recovery includes, stretching, walking, healthy eating and proper sleep. I won't cover too much in detail on these topic, however, these are requirements for muscle growth.

Summary

Resistance training is necessary for healthy weight loss. Healthy weight loss refers to maximum amount of fat loss while minimize the muscle loss. Although managing your diet is important, exercise to stimulate the muscles 2-3 times per week is equally important. Without stimulus muscle will not grow. Once the muscle is loss, the metabolism will also decline and become difficult to get out from the weight loss program.

While working on weight loss, make sure to work on building muscles through resistance training.

Kota Shimada