Why is strength training important for losing weight? Strength training is important because many people try to starve themselves into weight loss. They think it's all about controlling calories. Unfortunately, a lot of dieticians and nutritionists don't really understand strength training, and they also think that it's just about calories: Calories in, and calories out. You consume extra calories, you'll gain body fat. If you have a calorie deficit, you're going to lose weight.

Let's say you happen to be quite obese and you have a high percentage of body fat. I used to be in that situation; I know what it feels like. Underneath that body fat you actually have a very strong skeleton and strong muscles. Your body has built up those muscles in order to carry all of that extra body fat when you move your body. Just the very act of standing up, walking across a parking lot, going up a flight of stairs or lifting your arms requires more effort when you're overweight, especially if you're obese. So the heavier you are, the stronger your muscles have to be just to allow you to do basic, everyday things.

Your body adapts to the need. You see, the body is an adaptive system. It will adapt to whatever loads you place on it. So if you are a heavier person and you're carrying around body fat, then your body will adapt by creating stronger muscles to lift your body. It's almost like doing a leg press every time you get up out of the chair. If you weigh 300 lbs., you're doing a 300 lb. leg press, you see? Now if you were to drop 150 lbs. of body fat, and end up at 150 lbs., your body wouldn't need the same amount of leg muscle to lift you. It would eliminate those leg muscles through catabolic action.

Strength train while losing weight. The solution to all of this - the strategy I want to focus on here - is to engage in strength training while you are losing body fat. If you do this, then you will be able to maintain the muscle mass that you already have underneath your body fat while you are in the process of losing the fat. This will leave you with a greater proportion of lean body mass to body fat, meaning that you will be slimmer, yet you'll have the muscles that you had when you were overweight.

Women need strength training, too. Let's take a moment to cover that myth here. Let's say you're a woman and you have more body fat than you want. You're trying to decide, "Should I engage in strength training as part of my weight loss program?" Some women say, "No, because I'll bulk up and it'll make me look fatter.

When you have a high percentage of body fat, that body fat is stored not only in the tissues that are obvious - such as your hips and your midsection, your arms and legs and so on - it's also stored intramuscularly, which means it's stored within the muscles of your body. It's sort of like the marbling of beef from a cow. If you slice a muscle from a cow, there's some fat inside the muscle… that is the same kind of fat that's in our muscles when we have a high percentage of body fat.

Don't lose the muscle you've already built. So with that crazy myth covered, let's get back to the main point, which is that engaging in strength training will conserve the muscle mass you have now. Now here's why this is so important: It's very easy for your body to shed useless muscle. So if you're not using a muscle, your body will get rid of it over a few months. It's gone. But to gain that muscle back - now that takes some effort! That could take months or years of strength training.

It's also important to note that when people talk about weight loss, they throw that term around without really understanding what it means. Everybody says "I want to lose weight," but they don't really mean that. They mean they want to lose body fat; they don't want to just lose weight. A limb amputation will cause you to lose weight, but that's not what people have in mind! People want to lose body fat. So be careful what you wish for - and don't use that bathroom scale as a measure of your progress. There are a number of reasons why.

9 lbs. of fat and 0.

Don't forget the glycogen fuel stored in your body. The other thing to keep in mind when you're using the bathroom scale is that when you first start limiting your calories, your body is going to start burning through its glycogen stores. Glycogen is basically a fuel stored in your body. It stores sugars together with water and locks them up in the tissues and organs of your body like an energy battery, ready for you to use at a future time.

Bathroom scales are useless. So ignore the bathroom scale. It is not useful for telling you how successful you are in losing body fat. I don't use one at all. The only measure you should use is a "fat scale" or a caliper. A caliper is the best way to measure body fat. Body fat calipers measure the thickness of body fat in key locations around your body. For men, one location is on the upper pectoral area, another is the midsection and the third is on the top of the quadriceps of the leg. For women, it's the back of the arm, the midsection and along the hip.

How do you lose bone mass? Easy: you stop engaging in exercise, stop walking, and stop running. If you do all that (which I'm not recommending, by the way), then you would start to lose bone mineral density, and that would be reflected as weight loss. When you say you want to lose weight, be careful what you ask for. Your body has a number of ways to lose weight that have nothing whatsoever to do with losing body fat or enhancing your overall state of health.