Is Weightlifting a Fat-Burning Workout?

Dear Swole Woman,

My question is about whether weightlifting is a fat-burning workout. But first, I must say that your column has greatly inspired my solo lifting journey. I got into lifting because of an ex and had no idea if my progress was similar to (or even normal for) other females. Your column and some of the resources you link to have given me the tools and confidence to keep going, especially after the relationship ended and I no longer had a dude by my side in the Big Scary Weight Section.

I started out following a routine which was carefully curated by my ex, consisting of 8 exercises doubled up for super-sets for sets of 15, 12, 10 and 8, swapping back and forth, with little or no rest. Oh, and we would run before and after this routine. This is what I continued to do for the next three years, albeit inconsistently, because, life.

A few months ago, I started going back to the gym in earnest. My goals are always 1) being healthy and strong 2) burning fat. I got up to 65 pounds on bench and 70 for deadlift, and I burned a good bit of fat, but I noticed that I seemed to be working a lot harder and moving much faster than everyone else in the gym. I was also truly exhausted after each workout.

This week, I started the 5x5 Stronglifts program (at my normal weight, not what they suggested) to try to switch it up. This program has come with a lot of recommendations from yourself as well as other lifters I know. However, after my old routine, it feels like such a drastic downshift! I find myself getting antsy during the 90-second rests and troubled over the lack of sweat. I want to continue to burn fat, and it just feels like this isn't going to cut it. Is it supposed to feel easy? Should I add in some additional exercises, or start with a sweat-inducing warm up? Or should I just follow the program and wait for the results?

Thanks for all of your advice!

I’m so glad you’re back to lifting!! So here is the thing about the way lifting feels, particularly when you’re just starting out with actually building strength, as opposed to just exercising—it may not feel like you’re doing much. Lifting for intensity, especially when the workout consists of maybe only 15 to 20 minutes of actual activity spread over 40 to 60 minutes, you might just not sweat very much at all. It is eminently common not to sweat at all, or only sweat a little, or to sweat buckets for that matter, as sweating threshold varies from person to person.

Emphasis on calories burned has become a real cultural force, and exercise studios or classes or instructors often sell their workouts based on that (“600 calories in one hour!” For the record, this is about the same burn rate as running for an hour; there is nothing special, calorie for calorie, about Barbell Dance Level II, or whatever it is that’s marketing itself on this relatively achievable calorie burn rate). But burning calories is not the best way to think about exercise or health, for a few reasons. For one, those calories-burned estimates are just that—estimates. And they might not look anything like what a particular individual is actually burning. What’s more is that research suggests that after a certain point, energy expenditure (calories burned) plateaus—it turns out that piling on activity isn’t necessarily piling onto the caloric burn. Beyond that, exercise only accounts for a small percentage of our bodies’ daily energy usage. Add to that the fact that exercise is now understood to either hinder—or at the very least not impact—weight loss efforts, and it starts to become clear that calorie burn probably isn’t the best way to look at whether a workout is effective, pretty much no matter what your goal is.

For another reason, if you’re comparing activities, while there is evidence that lifting weights burns fewer calories than most types of cardio, remember that more muscle mass helps increase your resting metabolic rate a bit, which means that at rest you’ll burn a few more calories than you would with less muscle mass (note: the increased burn is not wildly high). But! But. So many factors impact metabolism and weight loss that it’s not worthwhile to evaluate an activity based on caloric burn alone. Exercise is really good for your health, period. And after lifting, you have built actual muscles and strength to use in your daily life, a benefit that cannot be underestimated. But since you’re concerned specifically about fat burn, let me add one more point in the strength-training-is-great-for-all-goals column: The more muscle you have, the harder and longer you’ll be able to work out, which is great for your goal of burning fat.

When talking about your lifting routine, I’m not sure what you mean by “at my normal weight, not what they suggested.” But if it means that you are not adding weight to your lifts as the programs suggest, at least weekly if not every session, but you are also completing all your sets with flying colors and never feeling taxed, you should add weight. Any beginner lifting program will instruct you to add weight to your lifts consistently, and if you are eating and resting enough to support your lifting program—barring injuries or limiting factors like mobility problems—you should be able to.

Starting-strength “linear progression” type lifting programs, whether Stronglifts or GZCLP or something else, are not really designed for performing the same weights over and over for a relatively unskilled lifter. They are designed specifically for building strength, keeping the reps low and intensity high so that your muscles get the right amount of damage to rebuild on your rest days, and then you come to the next session stronger than before. “Linear progression” means, literally, getting consistently stronger by adding the same amount of weight at the same time interval, and this should be doable for at least a few months.

It is possible you have just started at weights that are relatively easy for you, but the nice thing about linear programs is that they get tougher relatively quickly. The best way to judge if you’re going hard enough isn’t by how much you sweat per se, but how you feel during and after your sets. For example, I don’t always break a sweat on sets of less than five, but I know I’m not being challenged enough on a set if I just set the barbell down and I am immediately bored and not thinking about how I’m going to complete my next set. If I feel out of breath and taxed and need time to stand and collect myself, but was still able to finish all the reps with perfect form, that was the right amount of difficulty. You may want to check that your lifting form is on point (if you don’t like Stronglifts’ resources on this, there are other websites, books, and videos), because it can be tough to get stronger if you’re not letting your body move and use its muscles in the strongest ways.

If you let these programs get you stronger and you decide to transition out of strength building after a while, you will be able to lift more weight when just working out. Maintaining muscle is not as much work as building it in the first place, but if you don’t have much to begin with, you should give yourself that chance to actually get strong.

How Do I Get Abs?

Before we get to this week’s question I must draw everyone’s attention to this tweet about the general swoleness of the USA Olympic gymnastics team:


How do I get abs? I can kind of see the outline of abs sometimes so I feel like it’s attainable, but no idea what to do other than A Lot of Sit-ups, which the internet tells you not to do. Do I have to starve myself and eat protein? Is this an unhealthy fitness goal that I should just give up on? — Adrianne

Sit-ups or other core work aren’t going to give you abs, or at least doing ~only~ that won’t give you abs. You do need to have some muscles there, but you don’t have to do anything in particular to get them. And what kind of column about swoleness would this be without a plug for heavy lifting, which follows: squats, deadlifts, and so forth require a lot of core stabilization and will likely give you more abs than any number of crunches you can do! I will personally bet everyone that even if you try to be as ripped as you can possibly be, you still won’t look ripped enough.

A more general note on “a lot of situps”: some trainers will tell you a large volume of direct core work (planks, side bends, sit-ups, v-ups, etc etc etc) can actually thicken your midsection a bit. This isn’t something I’d worry about too much, but if you are so tired of doing this stuff and seeing no results, then here is my gift-advice to you: stop doing that garbage and try something else. Those exercises have their place, but a full-body workout will be so much less annoying and work so much better. People love to talk about core work (e.g., Bella Thorne), and we all know intellectually that you cannot spot-reduce body fat, yet we all at some point we have fallen into the trap of doing planks for eternity hoping by some miracle it will give us a sixpack. Nope.

There is an old fitness/bodybuilding/etc adage that goes “abs are made in the gym but revealed in the kitchen.” Point being, you’re not going to have visible abs in most cases without also having pretty low body fat. If you’re around 20% BF, as a woman, you’ll have some definition, but to have like, washboard abs you probably need to be at 15% or lower. As a point of reference, you are considered to be a healthy woman as long as you’re below about 32% body fat.

Here are some pictures that roughly illustrate this point:

Source: Simon Krastev Fitness

I obviously can’t fact check the numbers there but the overall relationship holds: less body fat = more visible abs. Which of these pictures you’re really talking about when you say you want abs, I can’t really be sure, but I think most women idealize that 15–18 percent range. That second photo shows you can have a little definition well above that.

To the point of overall muscle building, it’s much easier to lose body fat with more muscle mass because your resting metabolism will be higher, so again, full-body strength training is great for this.

Do you need to starve yourself? No; if you are new to this and don’t have a lot of body fat to begin with, you can build up some muscle by lifting and eating at maintenance calories (which you should figure out using a calculator like this one) or even a little more. Please do eat your protein. Then after a few months you can switch to “cutting” (eating 10–20% below maintenance calories while continuing to lift weights, in order to maintain as much muscle mass as possible). And then boom, you’ll have abs!

One thing you’ve heard that is true — you can’t safely/sustainably lose more than a pound a week, as a woman, in the vast majority of cases. If you work out in a way that is designed to build muscle, such as lifting heavy, and eat enough, you will give your body the best chance of making that pound mostly fat, rather than a combination of fat and muscle, which is what can happen if you run yourself ragged working out and try to subsist on a meager 1200 calories per day. If you want to lose more fat than you reasonably could in a few months, you should probably plan a break for yourself, since cutting calories can get kind of psychologically tedious and returning to maintenance calories for a bit shouldn’t affect your progress.

At this point you may be like, how I even find out what my body fat percentage is? And there’s no good answer there, in my opinion — even the most accurate methods out there for calculating it, like Dexa scans, can vary by a few percentage points. There is not even really a good reason for trying to measure it — again, in my opinion — since if it’s high and you love how you look, or it’s low and you wish you had more definition, knowing your exact percentage doesn’t help you at all. If you want more definition, you will have to take the same approach, regardless of having a number — lift and eat at a modest deficit to maintain muscle while slowly losing fat. There is a lower limit to how much fat you can lose — when women in particular get down to very low body fat percentages (12% or less) they can start having health problems, hormone imbalances, miss their period, etc. If those things start happening to you, even if you’re not super-low body fat, see a doctor.

Now for the real talk — I will say, personally, it is tough to cut below and maintain much less than about 20% BF. Most people you see with abs, like models, bodybuilders, or bikini competitors are likely cycling through a process of “bulking” (eating at a caloric surplus to build muscle, a time during which they will inevitably gain a bit of fat) and then cutting, per above. Maybe fitness models with an intense schedule maintain washboard abs year-round, but most stage competitors/bodybuilders do it just for the competition seasons; the rest of the year they’re quite a bit thicker. (*whispers* theoretically, as a reputationally fit person, you can just take a shit-ton of photos and videos when you are in fighting form and be thicker the rest of the year. I’m not saying they’re all tricking you, but most of them are maybe tricking you).

And now for the realest talk — very few people look like they have abs when they are just standing around. Generally, they are flexing. Peruse this thread of people showing their midsections flexed and unflexed. Look at Kayla Itsines of the BBG empire doing an actual workout, where her abs are not really visible, vs. one of her posed pictures. Take a scroll through and you will see she is not only flexing but she basically always cranks her body to the side in good lighting to emphasize the definition. Which is fine! But know what you’re looking at: a good solid flex plus chiaroscuro lighting dramatically improves the appearance of abs. Unfortunately none of us walk around like that, so take any posed shots you see with a grain of salt and do not compare yourself to them.

So is this a healthy goal? You would be far from the first person working out to try and look a particular way, and it kind of depends where you are in life — I would be less concerned about someone pursuing this who already has all the fitness building blocks down and just wants to try something, versus someone trying to fall backwards into a healthy lifestyle using abs as a carrot. If you’re the latter, maybe focus on getting your food and exercise schedule right, knowing that it will put you on the path to abs if you decide later that’s what you want. There is just no shortcut.