How Strength Training Burns Fat Whilst You Sleep

You do not need to become a bodybuilder in order to experience the benefits of strength training and weight training. Besides anything else, whatever you don’t strengthen, weakens. This goes for your entire musculoskeletal system (muscles, bones, joints, ligaments, tendons etc) as it does for your vital organs too. Strength training really is essential in keeping healthy and strong.

Weight training is a very effective method for raising your metabolism, burning calories and increasing testosterone levels – as well as muscle tone and/or gain of course.  Whilst you do not burn off as many calories whilst weight training (as you do with cardiovascular training), when done correctly, you’ll continue to burn calories for several days after doing the training. This is because when you lift heavy weights you damage the muscle tissue. The muscle gain takes place after your workout, providing you also consume the correct types of food. The damaged muscle tissue is repaired through your body expending calories, much the same as it would repair a wound. A few days later, your muscle enters the hypertrophy phase when the muscle actually grows. This is how strength training burns fat whilst you sleep. Note that that ‘pumped’ appearance during a workout is not actually your muscles growing – it’s purely fluid retention and blood flow around that area, as awesome as it looks and feels.. 🙂

Whilst you may not want to become a bodybuilder it is worth knowing a few things about bodybuilding and how it helps with fat loss and increasing testosterone. A reminder: when you do a lot of endurance cardio, not only do you lose fat, you also lose muscle mass as you start to release the stress hormone, cortisol, and that breaks down muscle tissue. When you lose muscle mass, your testosterone levels also decrease. Since testosterone fights against oestrogen, if your testosterone levels are depleted, then the oestrogen has a greater chance of roaming free in your body, thus it becomes more difficult to burn fat.

Building Muscle Increases Your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). As explained above, your body burns calories through muscle reparation and hypertrophy (muscle gain). This in turn increases your BMR, so you burn more calories at rest.

The best way to boost testosterone levels is to lift heavy weights, doing 3 sets of 6-8 repetitions (reps), resting for about 40 seconds between each set. It’s important that you lift the appropriate weight so that you can only just manage your 3 sets. In order for your body to go into hypotrophy your very last rep must be to failure, or so you can only just manage it. This damages your muscle effectively to stimulate your body into muscle regrowth. It also causes testosterone to be released.

You’ll be pleased to hear that since muscles can take up to a week to recover (when training in this manner), twice a week is sufficient and focusing on compound exercises is best. These are the exercises that work multiple muscle groups at once and span across a number of joints in the body. Since the more muscle force you have behind you, the more weight you’re going to be able to lift, you can clearly see why this is so beneficial for increasing testosterone levels. Isolation exercises like bicep curls may give you big guns, but the muscle burning effects aren’t as effective.

The following workouts are recommended as they span across the largest muscle groups, so therefore increase testosterone levels most effectively:

Some of the best compound movements are:

• Press Up – an excellent bodyweight exercise that spans your upper back, core, shoulders, arms (triceps mainly) and chest (pectoral muscles)
• Bench Press – using a bar bell, this works your upper body, your chest, shoulders and triceps
• Dead lift – the most effective compound movement of all, using a barbell this works your legs (quads and hamstrings), core, lower and upper back, arms and shoulders.
• Barbell squat – similar to the dead lift though not quite as good, works your legs, core, lower and upper back, shoulders and arms.
• Chin Up  – a bodyweight exercise, tough for beginners, but simply amazing – works your core, biceps, forearms, upper back, shoulders
• Close Grip Pulldown – only one here using a machine but great when you struggle with a chin up. Similar muscles – biceps, forearms, core (not as much), upper back, shoulders
• Plank Holds – bodyweight exercise, brilliant for your c0re, back, shoulders, legs, stabiliser muscles throughout your body. Do these while watching TV. No excuses!

These pictures are screenshots of videos of a few of the multitude of exercises Jon and I have created inside the Members area of the Mojo Blueprint. This is an eight week nutrition and strength and conditioning program with meal plans. Please note this is not an eight week, do once, never again, type of regime. This is a lifestyle change with easily implementable steps.  Email me if you’re interested!