Burn Calories with Weight Training

Lifting weights in whatever fashion requires energy in the form of calories! So this one is for everyone who enjoys throwing around a bit of weight!

Recently I've been using my Garmin Vivoactive to track all of my weight training sessions at the gym. I decided to do this mainly because I was always curious to see whether my sessions were as intense as they left me feeling lol! Basically I kept track of my max HR, average HR, calories burnt during activity and finally which exercises caused the biggest spike in my HR (heart rate).

Pictured above is a fairly average leg session. I did 10 sets of 10 reps for back squats followed by 6 sets of 8 reps of stiff-leg deadlifts. You can actually see exactly where my sets started by the spikes in my HR. The biggest spike of 169bpm was my heaviest set of 100kg, I thought this was particularly interesting because 169bpm when doing cardio feels ALOT different to 169bpm under a barbell squatting lol.

Now where it gets most interesting is my average HR (120bpm) which is 65% of my max HR. Universally speaking, when looking to burn body fat you should be aiming to working within 65-75% of your Max HR to burn calories efficiently. That means I was in an optimal fat burning HR zone for 45mins which resulted in me burning 331 calories.

I know what you're thinking, 331 calories for 45mins of work isn't all that much and to be honest it isn't. But seeing as all I was doing was 10 reps at a time then resting, it's a very easy 331 calories.

The "Fat Burning Zone" is not the be all and end all.

Even though yes you will burn more fat staying within the "fat burning zone" I want to point out that HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) burns more calories in total through-out the day. But that's another blog!

Basically all I want you to take away from this blog is that if you are sick of your current training program and your goal is to burn calories than weight lifting/resistance training is definitely worth a try. As you can see by my results I only chose 2 exercises so it doesn't take much creativity to put a little program together!

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