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VERIFIED CONTENTAuthor: Maciej Szukała

Most people associate the gym and weight lifting with building muscle mass. This is why runners, cyclists and martial arts athletes avoid the fire of exercises with additional weights. It is hard to make a bigger mistake! It turns out that skillful training with dumbbells, machines or kettles will also help you lose weight. What should you know about weight loss in the gym?

Why do we lose weight thanks to exercise?

In order to better understand how to reduce body weight in the gym, it is worth asking yourself why broadly understood physical effort makes you lose weight and is it always the case.

Every activity we undertake is associated with an additional caloric expenditure. Its amount depends on many factors. Among other things, it is:

  • training length,
  • exercise intensity,
  • gender, weight and height of the exercising person,
  • knowledge of the technique of performing the exercises.

The state of training is also very important. The better you are at what you do, the more economic and technically correct movements are. Therefore, paradoxically, more calories will be burned by a person who is just starting to practice a given discipline than by a player with many years of experience.

However, exercise is not only about calories burned during activity. In the literature, much attention is paid to the recovery of oxygen balance. This is the period of up to several hours after exercise, when the body's cells use up much more oxygen than usual. Due to the pursuit of homeostasis and the anabolic processes taking place in the body (post-training supercompensation), the demand for energy also increases.

In fact, when you train, you burn more calories twice - during exercise and after physical activity. By increasing the daily demand for energy, it is much easier to reduce body weight, provided that you do not drastically increase the caloric supply at the same time.

Avoid heavy post-workout meals

The need for calories and their amount is also related to the question of the energy density of the post-workout meal. Many inexperienced athletes are convinced that after intense exercisecan eat virtually any food, in any amount, including fast food and sweets.

Unfortunately, the energy economy of our body works like a mathematical equation. If, after exercise, you eat more than you burned, and there was no caloric deficit before, for example, after a night break from a meal, the excess calories will be stored as body fat.

Of course, part of the surplus will be used to intensify the processes of muscle renewal, but the remaining excess will be put in the form of extra kilos on the weight. What's the conclusion?

If you train in the gym, to lose weight, eat a standard, wholesome meal after training. There is room for complex carbohydrates, proteins, fats, vegetables and fruits, but all in moderation.

How to exercise to lose weight effectively?

It is much easier to control your body weight in the gym if you know how to exercise. It is worth implementing a few simple rules in training that will help you increase your caloric expenditure.

Take care of your cardio effort

Complement your strength training with cardio sessions. In practice, any form of aerobic exercise will be fine, but in gyms, you will most often find rowing or bicycle ergometers, treadmills and cross trainers. You can also borrow a rope very often.

Try to choose a form of cardio that forces you to a different position than you take on a daily basis at work. If you work many hours in front of your computer, jogging on a treadmill will be a better solution than a bicycle.

You will find different views on whether aerobic exercise should be performed before or after strength training. The intensity of the effort is more important. Training with 60-70% of the maximum heart rate is considered optimal for fat burning. You can use a sports watch to measure it, but nowadays many cardio machines already have built-in heart rate sensors in their handles.

If one longer cardio session is too tiring for you, divide it into two shorter sessions, but done before and after the weightlifting session. In this way, you will be able to maintain the appropriate exercise time. The pre-training phase can also be a bit longer and be part of your warm-up.

Do multi-joint exercises

If you want to burn fat as quickly as possible in the gym, replace exercises on machines with multi-joint movements performed with free weights. Do exercises such as:

  • load squat,
  • deadlift,
  • pull-up,
  • rowing,
  • barbell charge.

They are better than isolated movements because they involve many muscle groupsat the same time, and harder work translates into more calories consumed.

When exercising, it is much easier to use a heavier weight than with simple exercises that only load one muscle group. This has the additional advantage that it increases the amount of anabolic hormones produced during training (including testosterone, GH). In practice, this means that you burn unnecessary fat at the same time, but you are also working on building your muscles.

Multi-joint movements raise the heart rate more easily than single-joint movements. So you can do a shorter but more effective workout to get the effect you want.

Workouts based on the so-called multiple joints are also more functional. The individual exercises are more similar to your daily movements rather than as synthetic as many popular machine-based bodybuilding exercises.

Exercise with free weights

When exercising on machines such as a hammer, crane or press, you may get the impression that using a much higher load than with free weights will help you burn calories faster. Nothing could be more wrong!

Choose instead:

  • barbells,
  • dumbbell,
  • kettlebells weights.

You will notice very quickly that working with less load but in full range of motion and precisely is much more engaging. This is because not only the exercised muscles are activated, but also the core muscles responsible for correct posture, a sense of balance and stabilization.

By doing repetitions with free weights, you force your body to work hard, and therefore you spend more energy than in isolated exercises.

Bet on a large range of repetitions and short breaks

Instead of doing a few repetitions with a weight close to 100% of your capacity, you can try to work for a long time. For this purpose, use e.g. half the assumed load, but perform a dozen or even several dozen repetitions without breaks.

This forces the strong involvement of many muscle fibers, but at the same time allows you to continue working not for several dozen seconds, but even for several minutes.

An alternative solution is to shorten the intervals between series, e.g. from two minutes to one or even several dozen seconds. It's a very simple way to intensify your work and increase the amount of calories you burn

Use intensification techniques with weights

To further increase the amount of energy used, you can implement various techniques that make it difficult to perform a given exercise.The most popular among them are:

  • combined series - based on performing two exercises on the same muscle group without a break between them,
  • trisets - involves performing three exercises for the same muscle group without a break between them,
  • superserie - consists in performing two exercises directly on opposite muscle groups, e.g. biceps and triceps,
  • cluster set - during a series of exercises, you take a break of about 15-30 seconds, then finish the series,
  • incomplete repetition method - consists of incomplete multi-joint exercises, up to total muscle fatigue.

Of course, there are many more methods. However, you must remember that these are solutions for experienced bodybuilders. Using them too often or in a chaotic manner creates a high risk of local overload and injury.

Most often, one or two intensification techniques are used in training for several weeks. After this period, take a break and train using standard methods. Periodic use of the described solutions allows you to drastically increase the body's demand for oxygen, and thus energy.

Bet on HIIT workouts

A perfect complement to the classic strength training is HIIT training (High Intensity Interval Training). A typical example of a HIIT unit is crossfit, which most often involves performing several complex exercises over time, repetitions, or number of rounds.

HIIT workouts are great at activating not only fast-twitch but also slow-twitch muscles. They also improve the efficiency of aerobic and anaerobic endurance. The universal nature of the exercises means that they force the work of many muscle groups at the same time, and thus burn large amounts of calories.

You don't need a lot of equipment to do high-intensity interval training. In fact, all you need is kettlebells, a jump rope, a wooden plyometry box and a pull-up bar. By using these simple tools, you can burn more calories in a short time than during many strength training sessions.

Support your effort with dietary supplements consumed before and after exercise

Correctly structured training is the key to success, but with a few simple dietary supplements, you can burn fat faster.

  • Comprehensive fat burners

They are usually based on ingredients such as caffeine, synephrine (bitter orange extract) or cayenne pepper. They will give you a boost of energy, intensify itlipolysis, and will also reduce the appetite. Thanks to this, workouts performed at the gym will run more efficiently, and you will see the results faster. Remember to use fat burners according to the manufacturer's recommendations. This applies to both the amount of the taken dose of active substances and the total length of supplementation.

  • Branched-Chained Amino Acids

Branched amino acids are nothing but leucine, isoleucine and valine. They work anti-catabolic, protecting body proteins against decomposition as a result of exercise or prolonged fasting, they serve as an additional source of fuel for working muscles.

  • Protein supplements

They provide the body with pure proteins with high bioavailability, which have an anabolic and anti-catabolic effect and support regeneration with a negative caloric balance. Depending on your needs, you can choose protein supplements with fast, medium or slow absorption kinetics to properly fill the gaps in the menu.

How many calories does training in the gym burn?

Strength training is generally considered an activity that doesn't burn a lot of calories. However, a lot depends on how you do them. If you use the above-mentioned methods, you will burn even 300-350 calories per hour at high intensity. Add 100-200 calories of energy used for cardio effort, and the total is starting to look impressive.

Crossfit workouts are even better in this respect. An hourly WOD (Workout of The Day) can burn up to 600 calories. Usually they are much shorter, but still an average of 200-300 calories per one training unit.

Remember that the values ​​given are only for the energy used to do the work. In addition, you should add post-workout thermogenesis, which can last for several hours after training.

It is assumed that the optimal rate of weight loss is around 0.5 kg per week. Faster mass losses are of course possible, but most often they will be associated with:

  • by reducing the force,
  • decline in stamina,
  • loss of muscle mass,
  • feeling lack of energy.

If you care about a stable weight loss, it is better to do it slowly but consistently than quickly and at all costs. Thanks to this, the results will be much more durable. To maximize the effect, it is worth training at least 3-4 times a week for 40-60 minutes at moderate intensity. This will allow you to increase your caloric expenditure without riskovertraining the body.

By training in the gym, you can not only build muscle mass, but also effectively reduce weight. It all depends on how much you give in the gym.

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