You might wonder how you can burn belly fat during your resistance training sessions. Well, truth is that you likely NOT burn THAT MUCH FAT specifically from the “actual workout”, what happens is that your body is put under tension and stress it has not experienced before. The heavy weights will force your body “to empty the tank” so to speak. You will be burning calories, sure. It takes energy to lift weights, obviously, but most of that energy will be taken from your muscles and carb stores in order to keep itself from breaking down completely. Cardio is better to lose fat, unless you do a very specific kind of resistance training called circuit training or station training with super sets and various exercises cycled to create that cardio effect from the lifting. The thing is, in my opinion is that it’s better (if you have the time) to specifically lift to build muscle (i.e. Lift heavy, and low reps) and have a seperate session of cardio after your routine, or during the days where you are not lifting to keep your metabolism spiked even during “off days” in the weight room. The actual calories that you burn from resistance training are the calories that come after the workout is finished, when the body does everything it can to “fill up the tank again”. It wants to rejuvenate and get back to “normal”, and also build more muscle so that it doesn’t have to experience the same overload one more time (it adapts to the stimulation). That’s how building muscle works, but when you train using circuit training you are not so much trying to add muscle or anything, you just want to drain the body of as much energy as possible so that it needs more energy to restore itself later. That’s the point of it… not really to biuld muscle, it’s more for losing fat. Both ways of training is good for fat loss, but in different ways. I tend to opt for the heavy weights, low reps (3×5) kind of schemes because I like it more… It’s more motivating to lift heavy and it feels nicer to lift more weight, even just once. For me, I prefer this kind of style as opposed to the 10-15 rep schemes with 3-4 sets of 6-8 exericses done in a circuit for example. My all out favorite is doing the Squat with bodyweightx1.5 or more of your own bodyweight for 5×5 reps. That’s a killer workout on its own and takes DAYS to recover from =) Anyway, hope this gives you some ideas on various ways to train in order to burn belly fat during resistance training, which the clear winner is circuit training… but the majority of the calories will be burned AFTER the workout when the body tries to “get back to level” with the energy stores.
Good luck with your training, go go go!
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