Does Strength Training Increase Metabolism?
Do you have the question, does strength training increase metabolism? I answer exactly that within this article! Let’s get to it!
To clarify, when I say strength training I am reffering to general resistance (weight) training.
To get a broad answer before we go into the fine-tuning of things, yes, strength training can increase your metabolism. Let’s talk about how it does that and some different circumstances relative to that effect!
Muscle Tissue Increase:
Resistance training has the potential to increase muscle mass. It is the most effective way to do so for most individuals. When we increase muscle mass, our metabolism goes up. This is because our muscle demands energy from our body in order to maintain it.
Roughly 6 calories per day are burned from each pound of muscle mass. So, if an individual were to have 80 pounds of muscle on them, that would burn 480 calories each day. If they were to gain 5 pounds of muscle, their metabolism would go up by 30 calories, bringing their total daily calorie expenditure from muscle mass to 510 calories.
Muscle mass also demands a lot of calories to grow. So if you are trying to grow muscle, your metabolism would likely go up as a result of that as well.
The Act of Strength Training:
We can’t forget about the calories we burn while carrying out strength training. When we are resistance training or partaking in any sort of physical activity for that matter, our body uses energy to carry out those activities.
A lot of the time, people overestimate the calories they burn from exercise. While you shouldn’t expect to burn 1000 calories from a workout, a 1-hour strength training session may very well burn 100-200 calories. That number will vary depending on the type of training and how intense/fatiguing the exercise is.
But, it is another way that one can increase their energy expenditure!
A Brief Note:
As you may or may not have noticed by now, the increases in metabolism from strength training may not be the most significant. However, little bits add up.
There are also, many, many, many other benefits of strength training besides metabolism. Soooooo many. Just because the metabolism benefits might not be quite as much as you may have expected, there are a ton of other reasons to partake in strength training!
Circumstances:
The other thing to consider is your goal while strength training. If you are putting on muscle and your bodyweight is increasing because of that, your metabolism would increase.
However, if you are losing fat and maintaining muscle mass, your metabolism would decrease. This is because fat still demands energy, about 2-3 calories per pound. If your overall bodyweight is dropping from fat loss, so will your energy expenditure. However, it is still bettering your metabolism overall when you consider your energy expenditure relative to your bodyweight and muscle mass to fat ratio!
If you are losing fat while simultaneously gaining muscle, it would likely balance out.
Wrapping Up:
That’s the article everyone! Strength training has metabolism benefits, but there are a whole host of other benefits. Metabolism is just a small part of it! I’ll be sure to put together another article in the future outlining some of these other benefits!
If you have ANY questions, please be sure to leave them in the comment section below where I will be sure to respond! Take care everyone and have a great rest of your day!
Here are some other articles that may be beneficial for your knowledge!
Weight Loss and Nutrition Myths
Until Next Time,
Kohl Johnson
Please refer to my liability disclaimer to ensure you know who is responsible for the use of this information after reading.
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