Building muscle helps you lose fat and pounds. The Mayo Clinic website states that strength training to increase your lean muscle will help you burn more calories and lose weight. As you get older if you don't do some kind of weight or resistance exercises to build muscle mass, you will gain weight. It is important to know that you can increase muscle at every age.
Muscle Strength
When you are strength training for health and weight loss, you want to be sure to work on muscle groups all over your body to help reduce fat. The American Diabetes Association recommends that you do resistance exercises three times per week to strengthen your muscles. You will get stronger over time and should start slow and increase weights to the point that you can do one set of eight to 10 repetitions without getting tired. You will want to build up to three sets.
Resistance and Weight Lifting
At home you can build muscle doing a few exercises with your body's own weight and little or no other equipment. Exercises such as push-ups, squats or ab crunches will help you build strength. Pull-ups require some kind of bar to lift your upper body above the bar. Free weights and weight machines can be used at home or in the gym. There are also resistance bands or tubing that are often used in physical therapy and later at home to build strength.
Cardio Exercise
The University of Maryland Medical Center website states that the American Diabetes Association recommends people get at least 2.5 hours of aerobic exercise per week to help control their sugar levels. Regular exercise can help prevent diabetes and help improve challenges such as weight management if you already have it. Physical activity not only helps reduce body fat but has other health benefits such as lowering blood pressure and improving cholesterol.
Interval Training
To burn more calories and help make your workouts more interesting and challenging, you can do interval training. This involves doing the exercises you like and adding short periods of more intense activity to them. If you are walking, walk faster for a specific time or space. If you are running or on an exercise machine speed up for short intervals. This helps you burn more calories during your training and give you more endurance to exercise longer.
Considerations
You can do strength training at whatever fitness level you are at. If you need to lose weight you will want to burn more calories by exercising or build stronger muscles that burn calories. Regular workouts will produce better results in terms of helping you lose weight and providing other health benefits. There are many different aerobic and strength training exercises to do in order to keep yourself motivated and interested in workouts. The harder you work out the more calories you burn and pounds you can shed.
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