Tips

The workout itself is only about 5 %. So why train at all, if you want to lose weight?

Because strength training changes the biggest share. More muscle means a higher resting metabolism, which is a faster metabolism, and it runs every day, including the days you do not train. You are not losing weight on the three days you were in the gym, you are losing it on all seven.

The second biggest share is everyday movement: walking, stairs, standing. That is why a brutal session does not always pay off. If it puts you on the sofa afterwards, you hand back at one end what you gained at the other.

And cardio? It stays important, just not mainly for losing weight. It is there for your heart, your circulation and your endurance, and those are good reasons on their own. For losing weight it helps, but the work is done by the strength training.

Mobility is not an extra at the end of a session.

If you cannot sit into a deep squat without your back rounding, you cannot load it safely. If you cannot get your arms overhead without arching your lower back, pressing overhead will cause problems sooner or later.

So mobility is not the opposite of strength, it is what makes strength possible. It keeps joints healthy, and it has a lot to do with whether you still move freely at 60.

More often is not automatically better.

Almost nothing puts people under as much pressure as this question. A lot of people feel they should be in the gym more often than their week allows. But the answer depends on only two things: what your goal is and how fast you want to get there.

Once a week is better than nothing. If your goal is simply to move your body, that is perfectly fine. But if you want to see real changes, you need to come to the gym at least twice a week. Three times is better still.

Nobody needs more than five times a week unless training is their job, because rest is just as important as the training itself. Going past your limit will not get you there any faster.

So what decides it is how you combine your sessions, so that the body recovers while you train. One popular way is push, pull, legs. The muscle groups that work together are used in one session, and in the two after that they are off. That way you can train on consecutive days and still get your rest, even six times a week if you want to.

There are a few finer points to it, and that is exactly what we talk about in our sessions: how to combine your trainings, what timing fits your week, and how to get the best result out of it.

Most people stop earlier than they think.

The most reliable sign is not how it feels, it is the speed. The last reps before your limit get slow, and clearly so: the final one can take two or three times as long as the first. You can see it on the weight and you can feel it, as if it had stopped moving although it still is. If your last rep went up as fast as your first, you were not at your limit, however hard it felt.

But a rep only counts if the same muscle did it. When a lateral raise turns into a shrug, or a curl into a swing from the whole body, the muscle you meant to train has stopped and another one has taken over. That rep feels like the hardest of the set and still gives that muscle nothing.

So the question at the end of a set is not whether it looked clean. It is this: did it get slower, or did the movement change? Slower counts. A change of movement does not.

Lifting will not make you bulky.

It is the worry I hear most often and it misses the point. Building muscle is slow and has to be wanted on purpose. What you actually get in the gym is shape, strength and better posture.

The most important reason is the one nobody says out loud: bone density. It starts declining slowly from around 30 and considerably faster after menopause. Strength training is one of the few things shown to work against that.

And then there is the part above: more muscle means a higher resting metabolism. If you want to lose weight, that is the part still there after the diet ends.