Why You Should Lift Weights To Lose Body Fat & Boost Health!

Today I want to discuss the purpose of weight training when trying to lose weight and increase your health.

A lot of people often get confused when they first start to work towards this, and are under the impression that they have to kill themselves in the gym, run, or sweat loads, in order to lose weight. And this often comes from the misconception that they have to exercise or ‘burn the body fat off’ of themselves.

Well the good news is you don’t! You can try, but it more often than not leads to injury, burnout, overtraining and doesn’t give you the end result you are after.

Your nutrition is much more impactful in helping you create a calorie deficit which is what is needed in order to lose weight. And it doesn’t require you to try and burn off hundreds of calories each day.

You will burn some energy weight training and obviously some cardio is great to boost cardiovascular health, but it is not the main tool we would advise to control your body composition.

So if we can accept that our nutrition will for the most part take care of weight loss, why do we need to weight train as we do this?

It’s because it helps make fat loss easier through the adaptions your body goes through as well as having many other health benefits.

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Here are 6 of the amazing ways that weight training will help you;

1.Boosts Your Metabolism - Weight training build muscle.The more muscle we have, the more calories we need to consume to keep us going day to day and the more we burn at rest. So essentially more muscle means we get to eat more food!

2.Builds Strength - Getting stronger improves your ability to do things day to day and with much more ease. Carrying your suitcase when travelling suddenly becomes easy without it hurting your back, or running around with the kids feels enjoyable without your knees hurting . The easier it is to move, the more likely you are to do it and so overall activity tends to go up as well which helps with weight management, as does your quality of life with less chance of joint pain.

3.Reduces Risk Of Injury- Injury risk will go down as you have more muscle supporting your joints and your movement patterns, body awareness and control will improve. You also develop more strength at greater joint ranges which again brings risk down.

4.Reduces Risk Of Diabetes - Studies have shown this can be by up to 30%! If you are pre diabetic, you can also reverse this with weight training by boosting something called your insulin sensitivity. It essentially improves our blood sugar management and ability to take our blood sugar into the muscle to use as energy. And also of note is the fact that it has a much bigger impact on this than cardio exercise.

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5.Improves Bone Health. Weight training creates temporary stress on your bones which causes them to react by building more bone tissue and improving their density over time. This can help off set age related decline in bone mass which reduces the risk of things like fractures and osteoporosis later on in life .This is even more significant for women who are at greater risk of osteoporosis due to hormone changes with menopause.

6.Aesthetics-  It builds shape snd sculpts your physique. Justing losing body fat won’t suddenly reveal a toned body!This part comes from weight training.

7.Longevity - Studies have shown inactive adults with no resistance training lose 8% of their muscle mass per decade along with a reduced metabolism and increased fat accumulation. We can slow this rate down, holding on to a leaner physique and a more capable and active body if we weight train!

I hope that has given you a boost in motivation to get to the gym and pick up those weights, or confirmed the importance of it for those who already do so!

Have a great week,

Lizzie

The One Percent Club

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