Weight loss – part 6
This is the sixth part in a series about weight loss including diet, exercise, measuring your success and keeping the weight off when you stop.
Last week I spent some time looking in detail at high-intensity interval training since there is plenty of research about
So far we’ve looked at lots of diet aspects but now it is time to expand into the world of exercise and what we can do from an exercise perspective to assist with weight loss. Today I’m going to briefly discuss the different benefits of resistance training and cardio and then next week I will finish off the exercise section of this series with some in-depth discussion of high-intensity interval training.
A brief foray into weight loss exercise
Exercise for weight loss is something I’ve written about before (see the Body Composition section of my training page) and I don’t intend repeating it all here. I am a big fan of using high intensity interval training (HIIT) rather than lots of steady state cardio when I’m trying to get rid of some excess fat. I’ve also, more recently, become quite a fan of weighted cardio during periods of weight loss.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m going to go into more depth about HIIT next week, but in the meantime what about resistance training. Where does that fit in the equation?
Using resistance training for weight loss
A little while back Alwyn Cosgrove wrote about the need to use resistance training to effectively burn calories. He notes that the number of calories burned from resistance training, thanks to the afterburn effect where the body continues to burn calories for some time after a resistance training session ends, is significantly more than those from a longer aerobic exercise session. So resistance training can cut your weight loss exercise time significantly.
The use of afterburn is hugely significant and is the reason that using programs like Fitday to measure your net calorie intake/spend in a day is complex. Nobody genuinely knows how much we continue to burn after we finish a resistance training workout since, while you can measure power output while someone is working out there is no way to measure the continued power output when they have stopped.
There have been various attempts to measure it (or estimate it) but ultimately it is likely to vary from person to person and depend one what that person did for their workout that day compared to their work capacity and usual strength levels.
Keep up the resistance training to burn calories effectively
Avoiding losing muscle while losing weight
Something that many of us are aware of when trying to lose weight is that our bodies will quite happily strip muscle from our bodies rather than those last stubborn vestiges of fat, since the muscle takes more to maintain.
Is it possible to not lose muscle when cutting fat? Certainly I’ve seen Leigh Peele, the fat loss guru, saying that she doesn’t believe so (although right now I can’t find a link to the article where I read that). While she says you can try to limit how much muscle you lose, she doesn’t believe it’s possible to keep it all either.
I think Leigh is probably right there. However, I have found that pursuing a program of heavy lifting and blending in with that some weighted cardio (so that even for cardio workouts my body is having to move some weight) seems to ensure I retain more muscle and, subsequently, more strength than when I dial back the heaviness of my lifts and use cycling and walking for my cardio.
Choose your resistance exercises carefully
The difference seems to be in having to keep using my muscles so that my body realises that it can’t afford to strip those particular muscles because I need them. Of course the pay-off from this is that I’ve found that when I go into a weight loss cycle I have to review my workout program to ensure that I really am using all the muscles. This is not the time for isolation exercises since a weight loss diet usually means you want to spend as little time as possible working out.
I’ve found that I get bests results when I am trying to lose weight from using plenty of full-body exercises – squats, deadlifts, bench press etc – and making sure that I am lifting as heavily as possible. In fact, during my latest weight loss cycle I’ve squatted some significant PRs and I’ve definitely not seen much muscle loss. The video below was some heavy squatting I did 4 weeks into a weight loss cycle, just to prove that it is possible.
That’s some initial thoughts to ponder when setting a resistance training program for weight loss. Next week, as promised, I’ll write about HIIT and why I believe it is so much more effective than steady state cardio for weight loss.
If there are any specific areas you would like me to cover during this weight loss series, please let me know!
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