Building the perfect body

Weight Training


Moving past the cardiovascular forms of training, next you come to weight training. Weight training is the type of exercise which will typically have the greatest effect on your long-term metabolic rate, therefore is the one you should really focus on if you hope to control your bodyweight months down the road.

The actual calorie burn during the weight training session itself can vary highly depending on the intensity and the types of exercises you are performing during it, but generally you can expect about five to ten calories per minute.

The more important part of the equation though comes with the after calorie burn. First, since weight training itself is an anaerobic activity, you are going to get the increased metabolic rate in the hours after you are finished, particularly if you're training with intensity and not using very long rest periods (say rest periods of between thirty seconds to one minute).

This will place that session on a similar scale to that of an interval session in terms of boosting the metabolic rate in the hours afterwards.

In addition to that, weight training will help your body generate more lean muscle mass tissue (provided enough calories are consumed), which then increases your basal metabolic rate 24 hours a day.


This is what we really are referring to when we speak about long-term weight maintenance and why weight training is so vital. If you are performing a solid weight training program on a regular basis, you're going to build the larger amounts of muscle mass, which is a primary determinant in basal metabolic rate.