Fat Loss

A new Harvard study has found that weight training is a better way of keeping the middle-aged spread at bay than aerobic activity.

Metabolic stress from resistance training determines improvements in body composition and health.

Strength training is an underestimated but effective weapon against obesity. In the long term, weight training is the best thing you can do to keep your fat percentage down.

Not everyone has got the message yet, but strength training is a highly effective way of losing fat. In the long term, because every kilo of muscle mass that you build up raises your basic fat burning rate, but in the short term too. Immediately after a heavy strength workout you burn sky-high amounts of joules, because your body eats up energy as it recovers.

If you do weight training and cardio, you probably do your cardio after the weight training. This order of doing things is beneficial, as this way round the cardio training won't sap your energy for pumping iron. But according to a human study done by sports scientists at the University of Tsukuba, and published in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, this order is also good for your cardio training as you burn more fat during the cardio part of your training.

Men who do strength training keep their fat percentage lower in the long term than men who run, cycle or do other aerobic exercise. Epidemiologists at the University of Harvard came to this conclusion after following 10,500 men for 12 years.

Healthy men who did twenty minutes of daily weight training had less of an increase in age-related abdominal fat compared with men who spent the same amount of time doing aerobic activities, according to a new study by Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers and colleagues.

Even if you only do a very small amount of weight training you increase your fat burning – not while you’re training, but when you rest. American sports scientists have shown this for the first time in a study on the long-term effects of weight training.