Weight Lifting Workouts – Good for Losing Weight?
Weight loss infomercials and ads always promote weight lifting workouts, but in reality, these weight lifting workouts are not designed to help you lose weight. Find out about this common misconception in this article.
First, weight lifting does not necessarily burn a lot of fat. Heart rate and overall fat burning capacity is relatively low, because weight lifting addresses only a group of muscles at a time for the most part. Therefore, the same time spent in an exercise that engages more muscles at the same time will burn a lot more fat and energy.
Weight lifting exercises actually contribute to weight gain because they workout only specific muscle groups. A proper diet and a good amount of fat burning exercises should be added to your workout routines to avoid weight gain from weight lifting workouts.
To maintain a balanced weight lifting workout routine, you should cycle through periods of weight lifting exercises and periods of fat burning exercises such as swimming or jogging. It is also advisable to give different muscle groups rest times to rebuild after straining them in strengthening exercises before working the same muscle groups out again.
It is also important to consider your overall workout goals and the time that you have available to put into the routines. Someone who wants to develop an overall fitness from scratch with a 3-day per week time availability will end up with a significantly different workout plan than a person who is in good shape and wants to build more strength in 5 workouts per week.
Most people who are looking to lose weight and gain better overall conditioning and fitness will get best results with a routine that matches about 2 parts of fat burning exercises with one part of muscle and strength building.
If you can only work out 3 days per week, you can perform two days of fat burning and one day of muscle building. If you can workout 5 days per week, you can do 3 days of fat burning and 2 days of muscle building. For best results, you can just try alternating fat burning and weight lifting days.
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