What’s the link between strength training and fat loss?

All movement is good for you, especially as exercise can bring a whole host of benefits to both your mind and body.

"I love combining strength training with cardio,” says Joe. “It's also why I'm such a big advocate for HIIT training. You can do strength training anywhere you want, all you need is a big enough space to move safely. You don't need any equipment either, you can just use your own bodyweight."

[Read more: A Beginner’s Guide to Strength Training]

People often think that to gain muscle, you strength train, and to lose weight, you do cardio. It’s a misconception that Stuart Gray, Professor of Muscle and Metabolic Health at the University of Glasgow hears a lot. But, “resistance exercise is as effective as cardio for fat loss,” he says.

Neither is superior – but strength training has more benefits than people realise.

A 2021 study found that we can lose around 1.4% of our entire body fat through strength training alone, which is similar to how much we might lose through cardio or aerobics. “Our findings show that even when strength training is done on its own, it still causes a favourable loss of body fat,” the study’s author said at the time.

[Read more: 5 ways to strength train without weights]

During strength training, you lose body fat but gain muscle and lean tissue at the same time. Your clothes may feel a bit looser, your body shape may change, and you may lose inches across your body – even if the number on the scales is the same.

Understanding body fat percentage and lean tissue

“This is all to do with the composition of our body,” explains Prof. Stuart. “For example, 20% of my weight is body fat, and around 80% is lean tissue. Lean tissue, in simple terms, is everything else apart from body fat (bones, blood, brain, muscle) – but muscle is the biggest part of that.”

So, someone who is 100kg might be 80% lean tissue and 20% body fat. If they continuously strength train, they might still be 100kg, but they’ll be 85% lean tissue, and 15% body fat.

“The goal isn’t to have 0% body fat,” he says, “Women have more body fat for reproductive reasons, but the average male is likely to have 20-25% body fat, and females would be 30-35% depending on age.”

And how does this link to strength training and fat loss?

Now this is where it gets quite science-y, but – at a simplest level – we have processes that happen in our bodies that control how we maintain our muscle. It’s called Protein synthesis, and it’s stimulated by exercise and food.

When we strength train, our muscles become more sensitive to the effect of protein and this muscle protein synthesis process will increase, explains Stuart. The response will be stronger because we’ve done exercise and therefore we increase the amount of lean tissue in our bodies.

For fat loss, we may not burn as many calories during strength training, but we are increasing our lean tissue. “This is key,” says Stuart, “as the more lean tissue you have, the more calories you burn by doing nothing – and your body composition will still change.” This means that after strength training, when you’re resting, you’ll still be burning more calories.

Strength training also has many of the other same benefits as cardio exercise, such as reduction in blood pressure and improvements in mental wellbeing. Are you up for giving it a go?

This article was written by The Body Coach content team.