What Is the Impact of Resistance Training on Metabolic Rate?

Resistance training has a multitude of health and fitness benefits. It helps you stay strong, fit, and function. As you know, muscle mass and strength diminish as you age. Plus, the gradual loss of muscle tissue you get in your 30s and 40s accelerates after age 50. Unless you work your muscles against resistance, you may have half the muscle mass by age 80 that you have at age 20.

But that’s not the end of the story. Did you know resistance training is also a lifestyle strategy for boosting your metabolic health? Research shows when you work your muscles against resistance, your cells become more sensitive to insulin, and you get better blood sugar control.

But there’s even more to the story. Let’s take a closer look at how working your muscles against resistance affects metabolic processes, including your resting metabolic rate.

The Metabolic Boost of Resistance Training

Resistance training is no slouch when it comes to improving your physique. It helps create metabolically active muscle tissue and that can help you build a leaner, healthier physique. Although the effects of strength training on resting metabolic rate are modest, resistance training also builds lean muscle tissue and lowers body fat. One study found that strength training increased resting metabolic rate by 5% after nine months of training. This metabolic boost occurs through several mechanisms. Let’s look at those.

By Boosting Muscle Mass

Pushing heavy weights or working your muscles against your own body weight builds lean body mass i.e., muscle tissue. When you lift consistently and build muscle, you gain metabolically muscle tissue, tissue that’s more active and burns more calories at rest than fatty tissue.

Research shows that for every additional pound you add to your frame, you burn an extra six calories daily when you’re resting. In contrast, you burn only two calories for every pound of fat. It’s a subtle increase but significant.

Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption (EPOC)

Are you familiar with the concept of Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption (EPOC)? You might know this phenomenon by the name bodybuilders use – afterburn. It refers to the additional calories you burn after an intense workout that taps into your anaerobic energy system.

When you work up a sweat and exercise hard enough to tap into anaerobic pathways, you build up lactic acid and other waste products in your tissues and bloodstream. You also elevate your body temperature more and place more stress on your body. All this mayhem requires energy to clean up and restore your systems to baseline.

To get the afterburn effect, you need to lift intensely, but if you’re willing to put forth the effort, research shows you can burn about 7% of the calories you burned during a workout via EPOC, or the afterburn, in the hours afterward. Therefore, if you burn four hundred calories in an intense strength workout or other high intensity training, you’ll burn an additional twenty-eight calories in the hours afterward, even if you’re sitting in a chair. It’s not huge but it adds up.

Resistance Training for Boosting Metabolic Rate vs. Other Exercise Modalities

When you compare strength training to traditional cardio exercises, resistance training often comes out on top in terms of metabolic impact:

HIIT vs. Resistance Training

High-intensity interval training (HIIT) has gained popularity for its efficient calorie burn. However, research comparing HIIT to resistance training found both modalities produced similar EPOC values at 12- and 21-hours post-exercise, significantly higher than steady-state cardio. This suggests that resistance training can be just as effective as HIIT for boosting post-exercise metabolism.

Long-Term Metabolic Adaptations

While cardio exercises primarily burn calories during the activity, resistance training induces long-term metabolic adaptations. By increasing muscle mass and RMR, weight training creates a sustained elevation in daily calorie expenditure that persists even on non-training days.

Resistance Training and Obesity Management

The metabolic effects of resistance training make it a powerful tool in the fight against obesity:

Fat Loss and Body Composition

When you launch into a strength-training program, you anticipate gains in strength and muscle size. But how much of a gain can you expect? Resistance training programs typically increase muscle mass by 2.2-4.4 pounds. Plus, behind the scenes, you reinforce your bones and lower your risk of bone loss and osteoporosis. If you adjust your diet, you can also expect fat loss.

Visceral Fat Reduction

There’s a specific kind of fat that can wreak havoc for your metabolic health. It’s deep belly fat that produces inflammatory chemicals. These inflammatory chemicals, also known as inflammatory cytokines, can worsen insulin resistance and elevate blood lipids, and blood pressure. The good news? Strength training helps reduce visceral belly fat.

Metabolic Flexibility

When you weight train consistently and use progressive overload, you enhance your body’s metabolic flexibility, meaning your body can more easily switch from using carbohydrates as fuel to fat. That’s good for your waistline and metabolic health.

Optimizing Resistance Training for Metabolic Impact

To maximize the metabolic benefits of resistance training, there are strategies that can boost the returns you get from your training:

Focus on Volume

Building more muscle (muscle hypertrophy) will boost your metabolic rate more than lesser degrees of muscle development. Studies show a dose-response relationship between training volume and muscle hypertrophy. Aim for at least ten sets per muscle group per week for optimal results.

Use Heavy Loads or Limit Recovery Between Sets

Lifting heavier will fire up your metabolic fires more than lighter weights. So, work with heavier weights, during some of your workouts, and use advanced training strategies, like supersets, to maximize muscle activation. Doing this is also the best approach to building strength. If you’re not working with heavy weights, increase the intensity of your strength-training sessions by shortening the rest periods between sets. The latter is a metabolic conditioning workout, which also gives your resting metabolic rate a boost.

General Guidelines:

Sets and Reps:

For strength: 3-5 sets of 1-6 reps
For hypertrophy: 3-5 sets of 6-12 reps

Rest periods:

For heavy lifting (strength focus): 2-3 minutes between sets
For hypertrophy: 60-90 seconds between sets
For metabolic conditioning: 30 seconds or less between sets

Focus on Compound Exercises

Make the bulk of your movements multi-joint, or compound, ones. This approach fires up your metabolism more than focusing on isolation exercises, those that involve movement around a single joint, like leg extensions or biceps curls. To maximize the metabolic boost you get, go compound and work multiple muscles with exercises deadlifts, squats, bench presses, and push-ups. Compound or multi-joint movements like squats, deadlifts, and bench presses engage more muscle mass and elicit a greater metabolic response than isolation exercises.

Use Progressive Overload

To sustain muscle and metabolic gains, give your muscles a continued stimulus to keep adapting and growing. Gradually increase the weight, reps, for continued metabolic stimulation. It’s a fundamental principle of weight training. But also make sure you’re resting your muscles enough to ensure they have enough time to repair. Weight training creates microscopic tears in muscle fibers that need adequate rest and recovery time to repair and rebuild. Don’t work the same muscle group through strength training until at least 48 hours have elapsed.

Conclusion

Now you have another reason to lift weights – you’re giving your resting metabolic rate a boost and giving your body an edge when it comes to staying lean. Consistent strength training can be a game changer for your physique, strength, functionality, and metabolic health. Plus, you’re building bone density when you lift heavy. That’s important with so many women being at substantial risk of osteoporosis after menopause. So, challenge your body with strength training and upgrade your metabolic health.

References:

Aristizabal, J C, D J Freidenreich, B M Volk, B R Kupchak, C Saenz, C M Maresh, W J Kraemer, and J S Volek. “Effect of Resistance Training on Resting Metabolic Rate and Its Estimation by a Dual-Energy X-Ray Absorptiometry Metabolic Map.” European Journal of Clinical Nutrition 69, no. 7 (October 8, 2014): 831–36. https://doi.org/10.1038/ejcn.2014.216.
Geoff Lecovin. “(EPOC) Exploring Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption.” Nasm.org, 2021. https://blog.nasm.org/excess-post-exercise-oxygen-consumption.
Experience Life. “The Afterburn Effect: Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption,” January 10, 2024. https://experiencelife.lifetime.life/article/excess-post-exercise-oxygen-consumption/.
Mang, Zachary. “How Resistance Training Affects Metabolism – IDEA Health & Fitness.” IDEA Health & Fitness Association, April 16, 2019. https://www.ideafit.com/personal-training/resistance-training-affects-metabolism/.
Greer BK, O’Brien J, Hornbuckle LM, Panton LB. EPOC Comparison Between Resistance Training and High-Intensity Interval Training in Aerobically Fit Women. Int J Exerc Sci. 2021 Aug 1;14(2):1027-1035. PMID: 34567357; PMCID: PMC8439678.
Pratley, R., Nicklas, B., Rubin, M., Miller, J., Smith, A., Smith, M., Hurley, B., & Goldberg, A. (1994). Strength training increases resting metabolic rate and norepinephrine levels in healthy 50- to 65-yr-old men. Journal of Applied Physiology, 76(1), 133-137. PMID: 8175496
Aristizabal, J C, D J Freidenreich, B M Volk, B R Kupchak, C Saenz, C M Maresh, W J Kraemer, and J S Volek. 2014. “Effect of Resistance Training on Resting Metabolic Rate and Its Estimation by a Dual-Energy X-Ray Absorptiometry Metabolic Map.” European Journal of Clinical Nutrition 69 (7): 831–36. https://doi.org/10.1038/ejcn.2014.216.

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