Strength training is incredible for weight loss. Yet, “I don’t want to get bulky”, is said by almost every woman that comes in to meet with us.
Before we tell you why strength training is so good for weight loss, let’s explore for a minute this concern about getting bulky.
Will I Get Bulky if I Lift Weights?
I wrote an article on this back in June of 2020, but it is still prevalent in questions I get today. Here is an excerpt:
You are burning calories and burning fat when you lift weights. The more muscle you have, the more calories your body burns even while at rest.
In order to add muscle, that would be considered bulky, your calorie intake would have to increase drastically. Now don’t get me wrong, you should eat more lean protein to help your body build muscle and burn the fat, but the amount you would have to eat in order to be considered bulky, would not be what you consume in just your breakfast, lunch and dinner.
People that lift weights in order to bulk up have a strict plan they are working off. Most likely working out twice a day, 6 days a week, with a huge calorie intake. They are going to physical therapists to help them with recovery, and basically live and breathe fitness and nutrition as their job.
Coach Jennifer
How to Increase your BMR?
Like we talked about yesterday, increasing your BMR is an important piece of weight loss. The higher your BMR, the more calories you burn just by existing in life.
Strength training is a key piece to increasing your BMR.
Strength training increases muscle mass, muscle mass increases BMR.
Besides strength training for Weight Loss, Nutrition plays a Part as Well
Adding in more protein to your diet is an excellent way to increase your fat burning muscle mass. Only your nutrition coach knows what that looks like for you. I will say in general, the women I meet with DO NOT get enough protein daily.
Did you know that when you eat it takes energy to digest the food? Protein takes more energy to digest than any other macronutrient.
An article from Precision Nutrition explains it pretty well.
Protein takes the most energy to digest (20-30% of total calories in protein eaten go to digesting it). Next is carbohydrates (5-10%) and then fats (0-3%).
PN
Drinking cold water can help alleviate cravings for sugary beverages and your body expends energy to heat up the cold water to body temperature.
Getting more sleep is another option to help with weight loss. More sleep can help with stress, motivation, increase athletic performance.
Those are few simple places to start. Lift weights (always with a coach watching to keep you safe), eat more protein, drink more cold water, and get more sleep.
Why Do You Need A Coach?
We give away all of the knowledge, information, education we have invested in, for free. If you implement and follow it and it helps, that is great! But that’s not coaching. Coaching is Implementation. Coaching is direction and focus and where to start first.
In the end, we all pretty much know what is holding us back. We just need a coach to help implement it and give us focus.
For example, you already knew to drink water over soda. A coach isn’t necessarily about information, they are about strategy. Getting to know you and finding the strategy that works right for you, your body, your lifestyle, your environment, your current routines, etc.
As your Coach we will work to understand what results you want, and work with you to plan how to achieve, based on habits you implement daily. Each session we craft a plan for the week and we don’t leave until you are a 9/10 confident (at least) that you can follow through with your plan each day.
You want to save time, money, and exhaustion, spend 10 minutes with me on a call and we start the learning process about what you want to lead a happy, purposeful, fulfilled life!