Is it really true that strength training only builds big muscles?
Or can strength training be just as effective for fat burning?
Cardiovascular exercise, is an exercise that increases the heart rate and works on fitness and endurance. The aim of this is to improve metabolism, which affects how quickly you can lose weight and burn fat, which is why it is often recommended for weight loss. But strength training can be just as relevant.
Strength training together with cardio
Strength training together with cardiovascular training, even if not necessarily at the same time, is the most optimal option. Cardio has its advantages. It improves fitness, while exercising the heart and keeping it healthy, and positively affects the metabolism. So does strength training.
Strength training also helps to increase your muscle mass. It alone increases metabolis. You should know that muscle mass is more energy intensive than fat mass. It costs the body a lot of energy (calories) to build and maintain muscle. Therefore, your basal metabolic rate, how much you expend when you are not exercising as well, will be slightly higher. An admittedly simplistic way of thinking, reflecting how it works, might be that strength training makes you burn more fat when you are not strength training.
Continue to burn fat after your workout
So you continue to burn fat after strength training. The body uses energy, stored or recently consumed (in the form of food or supplements), to rebuild the muscle tissue broken down during the workout. Here it is optimal, although not necessarily necessary, to load the body with amino acids. The body wants to use it for the acute recovery.
Many people believe that you can lose weight and burn fat to a greater extent if you do cardiovascular exercise before and after strength training. Maybe you increase energy expenditure. But aerobic and anaerobic exercise, although sometimes overlapping, focus on different tasks. Exercising both in the same session means that the responses can counteract each other. It makes sense that different workouts for different types of exercise, if you don't just want to increase endurance, are more optimal for body composition.
Cardiovascular training, preferably as intervals or uphill sprints, is a good thing to implement. Likewise in training programs to increase in muscle mass. You can probably get a lot more out of the strategies if you schedule cardio training on rest days, when you don't do strength training, and vice versa. When you don't opt out of one in favor of the other, you can get more out of the training. You get both the metabolic effect when you exercise and afterwards, with better fitness, more muscle growth and less body fat.
Fat loss in the long term
Building muscle and burning fat, or gaining muscle and losing weight, is possible. Many people think it's not. This is because it is difficult. As a constant balancing act where muscle growth requires excess energy and fat burning requires a deficit of it, the equation seems impossible. But a training program with as much strength training as cardiovascular training makes it easier. Then you can always, quite easily, increase or decrease the frequency of the strategies when pursuing caloric balance.
I don't see any benefit in cutting back too much on calories in the context of a high-frequency strength training program. Not even to lose weight and burn fat. There are a few reasons for this. Fewer calories don't burn more fat. Despite what you might think. Too little energy also impairs and limits opportunities for muscle growth. Conversely, too many calories can make it difficult to lose weight and burn fat. Caloric balance or small surpluses and deficits, along with both strength and cardiovascular training, is the only way to burn fat and build muscle in parallel. Difficult. But possible.
Burn fat and lose weight
You may not be thinking much about muscle mass, either gaining or maintaining, when you lose weight. I can understand that. Although I can't see any direct benefits to it. Even then, when muscle growth is not primary, fairly high-frequency strength training with cardiovascular training sessions is more optimal.
Strength training is the fastest way to lose weight and burn fat. Whatever phase you're in, whether you're building or burning (or bulking or deffing, as it's also called), you should want to use an exercise regimen that improves fitness as well as boosts metabolism and strength at the same time. Don't be afraid to combine strength training with cardiovascular exercise, but plan your workouts so that the sessions don't have to be intertwined, and remember that nothing is as effective for losing weight and burning fat as heavy strength training.
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