Burning fat isn’t solely based on cardio. While many people think of weightlifting and strength training as just a way to build muscle, it’s actually a good way to burn off fat as well if you do it right.
There are tons of benefits with strength training that will help you burn fat, build muscle, and look more toned very quickly. There’s a big difference in strength training between high reps and low reps.
This is basically referring to the amount of repetitions you do in each set of your workout. For example, if someone was doing 3 sets of bench press, there’s a big difference in doing 3 sets of 15 reps and 3 sets of 5 reps.
Naturally you’d change the weight you’re using to do more or less reps, but it does different things for your body. When you do heavy weights and low reps, you’re making your body stronger.
Your body becomes more used to the high amount of pressure and the work it takes to move that weight, but it doesn’t help you much in the weight loss department. Doing low weight and high reps doesn’t make you as strong, but it’s much better at helping you put on muscle mass and burning fat.
When you’re doing high reps, you’ll probably be a bit sweaty and out of breath after the last few reps. This is a great sign. If you’re sweating, you’re burning calories. It takes a lot of energy out of your body to continuously move weight like that, so in a very similar vein to cardio, your body has to use fat as a source of such energy.
One major benefit of strength training is that, unlike cardio, it’s purely taking away fat as a source of energy. If you do nothing but cardio, you’ll get thin, but you won’t have much muscle on you, as cardio can burn muscle a bit on its own.
By doing strength training, you’ll still lose the fat, but you won’t have to sacrifice any muscle. In fact, you’ll be building up muscle, giving you the strong, toned look that you want much faster.
Strength training can help you focus on areas that are problem spots for you. In cardio, you’re losing weight equally across your whole body. With strength training, you can pick exercises that only target certain areas. For example, with stomach fat, you can focus on core workouts, or tricep workouts for things like excessive fat on underarms.
