Do you think running like Rocky is the only way to burn fat? Think again, resistance training is great for fat loss and may be the ultimate tool that you’re overlooking!
While cardio burns calories, resistance training transforms your body by building muscle, boosting your metabolism, and enhancing its fat-burning potential.
In this guide, you’ll learn what resistance training is, why it’s effective for fat loss, and how to incorporate it into your fitness routine.
What Is Resistance Training?
Resistance training is exercise that involves using an external force, like weights, resistance bands, or your body weight. This type of exercise helps to strengthen and tone your muscles.
Types of Resistance Training:
- Free Weights: Dumbbells, barbells, kettlebells.
- Machines: Plate-loaded gym equipment like leg presses or lat pulldowns.
- Bodyweight Exercises: Push-ups, lunges, pull-ups, dips.
- Resistance Bands: Lightweight, portable bands that provide tension during movement.
How It Works
Resistance training creates tiny tears in muscle fibers called microtears. The body repairs these tears using protein, making the muscle stronger and sometimes larger. This repair process requires energy, which supports fat loss.
How Resistance Training Promotes Fat Loss
Increased Metabolism (The Afterburn Effect):
After resistance training, your body experiences Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption (EPOC). This means your body burns extra calories for up to 48 hours post-workout as it restores oxygen levels and repairs muscles.
EPOC isn’t as crazy as it sounds but it does help your body burn a few extra calories after a tough workout, but it’s a small effect and not a big factor in fat loss.
Higher Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR)
Muscle tissue burns more calories at rest than fat tissue. Adding muscle increases your daily calorie burn, even while you sleep. It’s very similar to passive income but for your body!
Burning Fat Without Losing Muscle
Without resistance training, calorie deficits can lead to you losing muscle. Resistance training ensures that mostly fat is lost while mostly muscle is preserved during a fat-loss phase, improving body composition.
Hormonal Benefits
Resistance training stimulates growth hormone and testosterone production, aiding in fat-burning and muscle-building.
Resistance Training vs. Cardio for Fat Loss
Calorie Burn
Cardio burns more calories during the workout itself, especially in high-intensity sessions. But not much after. You have to manually burn your calories, essentially.
Resistance Training burns fewer calories during exercise but increases post-workout calorie burn through EPOC and significantly increases potential calorie burn by building muscle and speeding up your metabolism. With resistance training, you’re building your body’s potential to burn more calories on its own.
Think of cardio as working more hours at work to earn more money right now.
Resistance training is like investing and gaining wealth through capital gains that will pay dividends later, increasing your ability to make money without manual effort, and allowing you to earn while you sleep.
Body Composition
Cardio mainly reduces overall weight but doesn’t shape the body. Resistance training adds muscle while losing fat, sculpting a leaner, more defined physique. Not only does resistance training sculpt the body, it allows you to sculpt your body how YOU want to sculpt it!
You can choose to change how a particular body part looks by building it up. With cardio, you can’t do this at all.
Long-Term Results
Our bodies are adaptation machines, so cardio alone can lead to plateaus as your body adapts to the exercises you put it through. Resistance training builds your muscles to sustain fat loss over time.
With cardio, the results you achieve can fade quickly once you stop, because it primarily burns calories and doesn’t build lasting muscle. On the other hand, lifting weights helps build muscle, which increases your metabolism and allows you to maintain your results longer.
Even if you scale back on lifting, muscle mass helps keep your body burning more calories, so your progress is more sustainable over time.
You don’t need a ton of sets to maintain muscle and strength, just one intense set per exercise can be enough. Research shows that while higher volumes promote muscle growth, one set suffices for maintaining both size and strength in trained individuals (Source: Resistance Training Volume Enhances Muscle Hypertrophy but Not Strength in Trained Men, PubMed).
Unlike resistance training, though, cardio requires consistent effort to maintain endurance. Stopping cardio for too long can lead to a quicker decline in aerobic fitness compared to muscle loss.
How to Incorporate Resistance Training for Fat Loss
Effective Exercises
Focus on compound movements that engage multiple muscle groups. Exercises like: squats, deadlifts, bench presses, pull-ups, dips, and rows.
Scheduling:
You can make progress with as little as 1 day a week of training. Lots of people seem to find a sweet spot of training 2 days per week. Anywhere from 2-5 days a week will be plenty for most people.
Rep and Set Ranges
You can build muscle using any rep range from 1 through 30. Start with a rep range of 8-12 per set with moderate weight and push yourself each set until you feel like you could do maybe 2 more reps before you fail the lift and can’t lift the weight with good technique.
Progressive Overload
Progressively overloading, or increasing the difficulty of the lift, is the only way to get your body to adapt and grow muscle. Continuously increase the resistance (or add weight), reps, or sets to keep challenging your muscles and drive results.
Healthy Nutrition to Support Resistance Training for Fat Loss
Fat loss requires burning more calories than you consume. You’ll want to track your calorie intake to maintain a deficit without drastically reducing calories and risk losing muscle.
Aim for 0.6-1.2 grams of protein per pound of body weight daily to support muscle repair and growth. If you’re overweight or obese, use your lean body mass number instead of your total body weight number.
Include complex carbohydrates like oats, rice, or sweet potatoes to fuel workouts and aid recovery. You’ll want to aim to eat complex carbs about 1-3 hours beforehand. This timing allows your body to digest and convert them into energy.
If you workout in the mornings, eat a good amount of carbs for dinner to be fueled up for your morning exercise.
Stay hydrated by drinking 16-20 ounces of water 1-2 hours before your workout and sipping throughout as needed. Staying hydrated will improve your workout performance and aids in your recovery.
7-9 hours of quality sleep per night will help regulate your hormones, support recovery, and maximize your fat loss.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Skipping Compound Movements
Compound exercises burn more calories and build more muscle than isolation exercises.
A row works multiple muscles, including your back, shoulders, and biceps, while a bicep curl mainly targets just one—the biceps. Compound exercises like rows give you more bang for your buck by engaging multiple muscle groups at once.
Underestimating Rest and Recovery
Overtraining without adequate rest can lead to burnout and stalled progress. Overtraining can lead to fatigue, injury, and burnout, slowing your progress instead of speeding it up. Learn more about avoiding overtraining and the importance of rest days in my article Why Rest Days Are Just As Important As Workouts.
Focusing Only on Light Weights
As we talked about with progressive overload, you’ll want to lift challenging weights to stimulate muscle growth and fat-burning effectively. You don’t have to push yourself to failure all the time, but at least try to leave about 2 reps in the tank, stopping just short of failure.
Ignoring Nutrition
Training without proper nutrition will minimize your results. You can’t build a whole lot of muscle only eating donuts.
Why Resistance Training Is a Long-Term Solution for Fat Loss
The longer you train, the more muscle you build, which supports fat loss and a healthier body composition.
Unlike fad diets or extreme cardio, resistance training is a sustainable habit that boosts metabolism and enhances both physical appearance and mental resilience. It’s a lifelong practice that improves overall well-being.
Key Takeaway
Resistance training is the key to long-term fat loss success. Unlike quick fixes like fad diets or excessive cardio, it builds muscle, enhances your metabolism, and sculpts your body over time.
By supporting fat loss while preserving muscle, resistance training transforms your physique and boosts your overall well-being. It’s about creating a sustainable lifestyle that keeps you strong, lean, and resilient for years to come.
Don’t wait! Start incorporating resistance training today and experience the difference for yourself.
Are you ready? Let’s get lifting!
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