How Heavy Lifting Directly Benefits Fat Loss

Exercise helps burn more calories. No secret there. Everyone knows that performing aerobic exercise—cardio— is to be used when the primary purpose is to burn calories. But what many fail to acknowledge is the effect anaerobic exercise—lifting—has on calorie expenditure.
Here’s the thing, the calorie burned during cardio is largely limited to the duration of time in which a bunny is performing their cardio—what happens on the elliptical stays on the elliptical.
That’s fine, of course. If you want real results though, your best bet is to increase the calorie burn overall (i.e. burn more calories after the gym session’s finished). This is where a regular strength training program comes in.
Lifting heavy can actually help you burn more calories when you’re not in the gym.
This benefit’s because you get an after-burn effect, where your body continues using more calories in the hours following the workout. And that’s just in terms of calories burned. Those biological results are even greater the deeper we go, nutritionally speaking. On top of the thermogenic-like calorie burning boost, other functions gain in effectiveness too.
For example, protein synthesis increases (which is important for muscle growth, but not as exciting from a fat loss standpoint as the other mechanism benefitted. After a heavy session, glycogen absorption goes up, meaning the carbs eaten after a heavy hypertrophic weight training session are used more optimally: higher quantities of carbohydrates shuttled to restoring and repairing muscle glycogen (as opposed to liver glycogen, where carbs broken down into glucose are more apt to storing as fat).
In other words, if you wanna eat that post-workout muffin, and find yourself thinking you’ll just do an hour of cardio before hand and it’ll balance out, you’re doing it wrong.
Sure, keep 20-30 minutes of cardio. But, despite what you’ve been told, your fat loss gainz will be better protected if you dedicate the latter half of that workout to hitting heavy weights (to muscle failure).
Heavy Lifting Indirect Fat Loss Benefits
This one’s the synergistic benefit of increased strength and muscle development (as gained by lifting heavy weights) as it pertains to fat loss.
That benefit: worked muscles experience a strange adaptation. The muscles will grow in size and increase in force production, or strength. It’s this muscle growth that leads to another beneficial side effect — a boost in metabolism.
If that was too technical (i.e. boring), don’t worry. I got you…
Layman’s Terms and Parables: Biceps-Guy’s Hero Journey
When lifting weights, every muscle worked will experience their own little hero’s journey. For example, let’s take your biceps.

We’ll give them a superhero name — Biceps-Guy (because we’re creative) — and now we’re gonna travel Biceps-Guy through a vigorous hero’s journey in the kingdom commonly called IronWeight. The kingdom is under siege, by you, the planetary-suit where this is all taking place (in the process of heavy objects getting put up and down).
Biceps-Guy will play as a classic brawler type, resisting the heavy bludgeons swung by trolls, grabbing those heavy iron-trolls and curling them into oblivion. And when Biceps-Guy’s destroyed all those sets & reps of troll-curls, he discovers he has gained an interesting combination of physical benefits.
Four of those benefits Biceps-Guy expected. To start with, he leveled up. Consequently, three of his “stats” — Strength, Force Production, Size– all increased by correlative values. This was a result of the strenuous experience gains gained during the heavy set of four reps with the 500lb troll.
What he hadn’t expected, however, was that his increased muscle size resulted in an increased metabolism. In other words, he was burning more calories. ALL THE TIME.
(Sheesh, talk about an epic Passive Ability! A lot of you won’t get that joke. That’s fine, it wasn’t meant for you.)
If you’re wondering if you read that right, you did. Bigger muscles burn more calories than small muscles, and as a result, you burn more fat than you would have if you only did cardio or light-weights (which might as well be cardio).
muscle gainz = lean shredz.
Wanna Burn More Fat During Every Lift?
Of course you do. Because you’d be stupid not to. Or on a dirty bulk trying to conserve calories and accumulate michelin-man mass (not that there’s much difference when you think about it logically, but that’s beside the point).
To increase that thermogenesis and calorie burn while slaying PR’s under the rack (cage, bench, anywhere near a barbell really), here are the supplements you need in your stack:
HEAT Fat Burner: Everything you could possibly want for shredz*, and more that you need but didn’t ever think could be possible…
RACKED BCAAs: Revolutionary branched chain amino acid formula that can:
- Increase endurance*
- Delay muscle fatigue*
- Accelerate recovery*
- BURN FAT* like crazy; when I say burn, I do mean that, because trust me you will sweat.
WOKE AF: Our highest stim pre-workout boasts a somewhat secret benefit. Synephrine and dendrobium (two stimulants found in WOKE AF) both can increase metabolism*, so. . . yeah. . .you’re cool with burning more fat every time you lift, right?