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Are you having trouble trimming down? Your diet definitely accounts for the majority of your success here, but exercise can help take you the rest of the way.

In addition to high intensity interval training, weight lifting is an excellent way to get rid of that stubborn excess body fat, because working your muscles is the key to firing up your metabolism.1

Your muscles follow the “use it or lose it” principle. The more muscle mass you have, the higher your resting metabolic rate. As noted in a Nerd Fitness2 blog discussing the merits of weight lifting, while your overall weight loss in terms of

pounds may appear slower, you will tend to

lose inches faster.

This is in part because, unlike traditional cardio, strength training causes you to continue burning more calories for up to 72 hours after the exercise is over through a phenomenon called after-burn.

To Burn More Calories, Add More Muscle

There are many success stories out there that can attest to the success of strength training for weight loss. A very common problem is that people try to “run off” their excess weight. More often than not, all that running ends in failure.

Lifting weights, however, helps shed pounds as a side effect of building and carrying more muscle. In short, muscle contraction is the “engine” that drives fat loss.