What Weight Training Exercise Help You Lose Weight?
This is a part 2 post and you can read the first one here: Weight Training Good For Weight Loss?
Weight training can be very effective for weight loss for much the same reasons that interval training is – it allows you to get a good work out in a relatively short amount of time no matter how good (or bad) your fitness level is. It also builds muscles and is the exercise of choice if you want to get a tone body or trying to lose the last few pounds of stomach fat.
Now, because your goal is to lose weight (and get a toned body) in the shortest amount of time you want to do exercise that burn the most calories. That means you want to do compound movements rather than isolated. Compound movements involve more muscles which results in more calories burned. In addition compound movements are better for over all fitness, because they involve several muscles you build up all muscle groups simultaneously and don’t run into a situation where one muscles group is stronger than the other which can make you more susceptible to an injury.
Sounds good, but I never did weight training – what exactly are compound movements?
Compound movements are exercise that involve several muscle groups, for example a dead lift is a compound movement, much like a squat, on the other hand a bicep curl is an isolated movement that only involves biceps. So, avoid doing exercise for isolated muscles and do compound exercise like dead lifts or sauqts for the best results.
Keep in mind though that weight training requires technique in order to stay injury free. So start with very, very low weights and learn the technique before increasing weight. I would recommend going to a gym and seeing if they have a pro there that can help you learn the correct way to do those exercise. Do make sure that said pro actually know what he or she is doing and actually have experience in weight training.
Also, I would highly advise you to do those exercise with free weights and avoid machines. Most machines have several flaws in their design which makes using them for complex compound exercise a bad idea, as you will likely injure yourself at some point.
