Losing weight is simple, but not necessarily easy. When you boil it down to the most basic biology, losing (or gaining) body weight is mostly about balancing your calories: Create a deficit by burning more than you eat, and you’ll shed weight. Do the opposite and you’ll gain. That’s all there is to it.
It’s that “burn” bit that can be tricky, especially if you absolutely dread spending hour after hour each week on the elliptical or treadmill. If you’re a gym rat who prefers to clang and bang some weights as your main form of physical activity, or you’re on a weight loss journey and looking to speed things up a notch, it might comfort you to learn that lifting weights does, indeed, burn fat.
But things aren’t as simple as “do biceps curls, get a six-pack.” There’s a surprising amount going on under the hood — here’s what you need to know.
- How To Lose Weight
- Does Lifting Weights Burn Fat?
- Benefits of Lifting Weights
- Weight Lifting Program for Fat Loss
- Your Takeaways
Editor’s Note: The content on BarBend is meant to be informative in nature, but it should not be taken as medical advice. When starting a new training regimen and/or diet, it is always a good idea to consult with a trusted medical professional. We are not a medical resource. The opinions and articles on this site are not intended for use as diagnosis, prevention, and/or treatment of health problems. They are not substitutes for consulting a qualified medical professional.
How To Lose Weight
Weight loss is more math than mystery. If you want to lose weight fast, you need to create what’s called a calorie deficit. Put simply, this is the gulf between the energy you consume from food (that is, calories) and the energy you burn doing everything from brushing your teeth to banging out sets of burpees during a HIIT workout.
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For example, if you burned 2,000 calories over the course of a day but consumed only 1,500, you’d have a net daily deficit of 500 calories. Repeat that for all seven days of the week, and your 3,500-calorie deficit would amount to roughly one pound of body fat lost.
But your calorie deficit comes from multiple factors. One of the most important being the amount — and type — of physical activity you perform.
Does Lifting Weights Burn Fat?
People commonly associate certain types of exercise with weight loss, and others with muscle-building. But the truth of the matter is that your body doesn’t make that distinction. Any physical activity will burn calories, and the amount of calories burned depends on how intense that activity is as well as how long you partake in it.
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That said, it’s true that jogging and swimming don’t build appreciable amounts of muscle mass, at least not compared to strength training. So, it may seem like lifting weights is the best of both worlds; you can burn fat and build muscle. But what does science have to say?
The Science
Good news first: Lifting weights burns fat, period. But the long answer is a bit more complicated. Gaining muscle and burning fat, known as body recomposition, is possible but not necessarily practical. However, that doesn’t mean that the act of weight lifting itself isn’t a darn-good way to burn body fat:
- This nutritional study from 2019 (1) asserts that it is possible to build muscle by lifting weights while being in a calorie deficit, but that there are practical issues worth considering.
- Weight lifting creates genetic signaling which encourages your body to release stored adipose tissue (body fat), according to this 2021 paper. (2)
Fat burn is a question of caloric expenditure. Let’s dive into the data and see what studies have to say about just how many calories you burn by hitting the iron.
- One study remarks that, “low-intensity resistance exercise provides energy cost between 3 and 10 calories per minute,” (3) but that these values can easily double if you work above 80 percent of your 1-rep max.
- A similar study (4) displayed comparable findings of about 8.83 calories burned per minute when exercising with roughly 75 percent of 1-rep max.
- More broadly, this paper (5) notes that caloric expenditure correlates strongly with Rate of Perceived Exertion, or RPE. Put simply, the harder you work in the gym, the more calories you’ll burn in the process.
The Bottom Line
To put the science into simple English, lifting weights does burn fat. However, unless you’re going quite hard in the gym and performing lots of multi-joint compound exercises, the amount of calories you expend isn’t as high as a HIIT workout or long-distance run.
While strength training does create biological signals that help your body dispose of its fat stores, these processes must occur within the context of a calorie deficit if you want to make real, appreciable change on the scale.
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In short, yes you can use weight lifting workouts as your main form of exercise while your goal is losing fat. You’ll also have to have your nutritional habits dialed in and ensure that you’re in a calorie deficit as well, though. There’s no magic bullet for fat loss.
Benefits of Lifting Weights
Lifting weights burns calories — and can thus lead to fat loss — but that’s hardly it’s only benefit. In fact, that may be the least compelling reason to pick up a pair of dumbbells. There are other benefits of lifting weights that can enhance your results as well:
Building Muscle Burns Fat
Lean muscle tissue is considered “metabolically active.” That is, your body requires energy stores to maintain and utilize your muscles. By contrast, body fat is metabolically inactive. Once you store it, it mostly just sits there until you create a reason to burn it off.
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As such, gaining muscle mass will increase the amount of calories you burn by default, which can make it easier to stick to a fat-loss dietary phase. Studies indicate that individuals with more muscle mass may be less likely to experience obesity. (6)
Stronger Bones and Joints
It’s no secret that strength training improves more than just your muscles. One of its principal benefits is to your skeletal system. Research consistently and reliably shows that resistance training improves your bone density, which can help stave off age-related degradation and improve your resilience to injury. (7)
Bigger, Stronger Muscles
Most people think that you can lift weights for the purposes of muscle growth, or you can train for strength. While it is certainly possible to prioritize one or the other, the fact of the matter is that resistance training creates a synergistic relationship between how big your muscles are and what you can do with them.
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Put more simply, research shows that larger muscles with more cross-sectional area are better at producing force. (8) On the flipside, a stronger muscle can move more weight, which applies a greater stimulus, which incentivizes more muscle hypertrophy. No matter what you hit the weights for, you can expect to make gains in multiple areas.
Improved Cognition
Your brain may not be a muscle, but it is absolutely trainable. And spending time with a pair of dumbbells in-hand can do wonders for your mental acumen and cognitive processes.
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In fact, studies have shown that lifting weights improves important cognitive skills like memorization, recall, and even creative thinking. Some data suggest that strength training can have a preventative effect on conditions like Alzheimer’s, too. (9)(10)
Weight Lifting Program for Fat Loss
Knowing that lifting weights burns fat is, quite literally, only half the battle. To experience the many benefits of strength training, you have to actually, well, hit the weights.
If you want to harness the many benefits of lifting weights while also prioritizing fat loss, your strength training routine shouldn’t necessarily look the same as someone who is trying to bulk up.
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Compound exercises, high rep counts, and short rest times all burn heaps of calories, which will help you lose fat over time.
Day 1
- Walking Lunge: 4 x 10 paces per leg, rest 2 minutes
- Assisted Pull-Up: 3 x 15, rest 1 minute
- Burpee: 3 x 10, rest 1 minute
- Sled Push: 3 rounds, rest 1 minute
Day 2
- Back Squat: 3 x 15, rest 2 minutes
- Dumbbell Row + Dumbbell Bench Press: 3 x 12 each as a superset, rest 1.5 minutes
- Smith Machine Reverse Lunge: 3 x 12 per leg, rest 1 minute
- Bicycle Kick: 3 x EMOM
Day 3
- Plyo Push-Up: 5 x 5, rest 30 seconds
- Step-Up: 3 x 15 per leg, rest 1 minute
- Kettlebell Swing: 4 x 20, rest 30 seconds
Your Takeaways
So, in short: Does lifting weights burn fat? The answer is yes, but there’s more to it than just that.
- Fat loss comes from a sustained calorie deficit, not literally utilizing stored fat cells for energy.
- All physical locomotion burns calories, including your day-to-day behaviors and your exercise routine.
- Weight lifting burns calories, though not necessarily as many as a more long-duration or vigorous form of exercise.
- However, hitting the iron does elicit some specific benefits to your hormones and other metabolic processes that could potentially speed up the fat loss process.
- A weight lifting routine that encourages fat loss should be one that burns plenty of calories, which means using compound exercises and performing more repetitions per set.
References
- Slater, G. J., Dieter, B. P., Marsh, D. J., Helms, E. R., Shaw, G., & Iraki, J. (2019). Is an Energy Surplus Required to Maximize Skeletal Muscle Hypertrophy Associated With Resistance Training. Frontiers in nutrition, 6, 131.
- Vechetti IJ Jr, Peck BD, Wen Y, et al. Mechanical overload-induced muscle-derived extracellular vesicles promote adipose tissue lipolysis. The FASEB Journal. 2021; 35:e21644.
- Reis VM, Garrido ND, Vianna J, Sousa AC, Alves JV, Marques MC. Energy cost of isolated resistance exercises across low- to high-intensities. PLoS One. 2017 Jul 24;12(7):e0181311. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0181311. PMID: 28742112; PMCID: PMC5524349.
- Falcone, P. H., Tai, C. Y., Carson, L. R., Joy, J. M., Mosman, M. M., McCann, T. R., Crona, K. P., Kim, M. P., & Moon, J. R. (2015). Caloric expenditure of aerobic, resistance, or combined high-intensity interval training using a hydraulic resistance system in healthy men. Journal of strength and conditioning research, 29(3), 779–785.
- Vianna, J. M., Reis, V. M., Saavedra, F., Damasceno, V., Silva, S. G., & Goss, F. (2011). Can Energy Cost During Low-Intensity Resistance Exercise be Predicted by the OMNI-RES Scale?. Journal of human kinetics, 29A, 75–82.
- Zurlo F, Larson K, Bogardus C, Ravussin E. Skeletal muscle metabolism is a major determinant of resting energy expenditure. J Clin Invest. 1990 Nov;86(5):1423-7. doi: 10.1172/JCI114857. PMID: 2243122; PMCID: PMC296885.
- Hong AR, Kim SW. Effects of Resistance Exercise on Bone Health. Endocrinol Metab (Seoul). 2018 Dec;33(4):435-444. doi: 10.3803/EnM.2018.33.4.435. PMID: 30513557; PMCID: PMC6279907.
- Akagi, R., Kanehisa, H., Kawakami, Y., & Fukunaga, T. (2008). Establishing a new index of muscle cross-sectional area and its relationship with isometric muscle strength. Journal of strength and conditioning research, 22(1), 82–87.
- Herold, F., Törpel, A., Schega, L. et al. Functional and/or structural brain changes in response to resistance exercises and resistance training lead to cognitive improvements – a systematic review. Eur Rev Aging Phys Act 16, 10 (2019).
- Yarrow, J. F., White, L. J., McCoy, S. C., & Borst, S. E. (2010). Training augments resistance exercise induced elevation of circulating brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). Neuroscience letters, 479(2), 161–165.
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