Increase Calories Burned Weight Lifting – Important Facts To Consider

One thing that you might be wondering as you go about your workout program is with regards to the calories burned weight lifting.  While doing cardio you can get a rough estimation of your total calorie burn from looking down at the machine readouts, but when doing your weight lifting, you have nothing to go by.

While the calorie burn while weight lifting will vary considerably depending on how much you weigh, how much weight you’re lifting, your overall conditioning level, the exercise selection you use, as well as how intensely you’re working out, there are some good guidelines to note.

By learning what will enhance the calories burned weight lifting the most, you can structure your workout so that it’s best able to deliver the results you’re after.

Work In The Right Rep Range

The very first thing that you should be doing in order to maximize the calorie burn you get from your workout session is making sure to lift in the right rep range.  You don’t want to go too low with your rep range as this could make it difficult to see a good calorie burn from the session, so instead aim for around 8-10 reps.

This will be high enough that you will get the good calorie burn, but not so high that you are going to have to sacrifice on the amount of weight that you’re lifting during the workout.

Decrease Your Rest Time

Next, you also want to make sure that you’re decreasing your rest time as you go about your workout session as well.  Lowering the amount of rest you take between sets is one of the biggest things that you can do to enhance your metabolic rate and crank up the intensity of the overall workout session.

If you can aim for rest periods of around 30-45 seconds rather than the one to two minutes that most people take, you’ll see far superior progress.

Just keep in mind that lowering the rest should never cause you to sacrifice the amount of weight that you’re lifting as if it does, that’s an instant sign that you should be lengthening it slightly.

Implement Supersets And Drop Sets

Another great method to boost the overall calorie burn that you get from your workout session is to perform supersets and drop sets.

These are really going to be ideal in terms of making the body work harder with each and every lift that you do as well as shortening up the total time you spend doing the workout.

If you’re someone who’s relatively short on time and wants to get in and out of the gym as fast as you possibly can, supersets and drop sets are one of the best ways to do this.

Lift Heavier Weight

Finally, last but not least, to increase the calories burned during weight lifting, make sure that you’re also lifting a heavier weight.

Never let yourself come to think that you can see faster results from lifting lighter weight while using high reps.  Far too many people let themselves believe this and it’s just not true.

Lift heavier, keep the rep ranges reasonable, but most importantly, focus on keeping the rest periods short as suggested above.

Do that and you’ll be on the way to fat loss success.

So there you have the main things to note about increasing the calories burned during weight lifting.  Overall, this is simply the best form of activity that you could be doing to move closer to your fat loss goals.

[stextbox id=”grey” caption=”About the Author”]Shannon Clark holds a degree in Exercise Science from the University of Alberta, where she specialized in Sports Performance and Psychology.  In addition to her degree, she is an AFLCA certified personal trainer and has been working in the field for over 8 years now.[/stextbox]


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