Weight Loss through Weight Lifting?
 

I started at 303 a month ago and now I'm at 308.

Has anyone here tried primarily weightlifting as their exercise of choice?
Did you begin to lose weight right away or did you gain weight first?
What was your calorie restriction like?

I lost a lot of weight while weight lifting. Your diet is key! You gained 5 pounds in a month due to what you've been eating, not what you've been lifting. Some people will try to tell you that it's because you're gaining muscle but to be honest, you'd have to be on some seriously anabolic steroids to gain 5 pounds of muscle in a month. Even the people that do it on steroids do it because they can eat you out of house and home!

How are you lifting? What kinda of schedule? do you warm up with cardio? you can try to do cardio lifting...lifting lower weights, and no rest in between...go from exercise to exercise to failure... this will blow up your cardio...and is what helped me break plateaus.

I'm just going to follow up on what the other two posters said.

First off let me say this. There is a saying, "You can't out train a bad diet." This means if you don't get your diet into shape it will be hard to change your body shape.

I'm a marathon runner and I do weight lifting. Long distance running does burn a lot of calories but for me the fastest way to lose weight and I'm talking about even the stubborn last 10-15 lbs is with resistance training. But it has to be a specific type. If you look into P90X and Insanity they base these workouts on certain principles. Interval training, muscle confusion, and excess post-exercise oxygen consumption or EPOC. If nothing else you should look up EPOC. You can design a workout based on these principals and achieve great results.

Put together a three day full body workout, excluding core exercises. I would recommend some type of split workout. To begin I would suggest about 5 exercises per daily workout with 4 sets per exercise. If you do an active stretching routine before your weight lifting session then you can reduce this to 3 sets. I don't like doing stretching before my workout so my first set is my warm up set and I use either no weight or very low weight. Do 12 reps for your first set. Rest 45-60 secs between each set. The 2nd set should be a higher weight at moderate effort. Do 10 reps for your 2nd set. Again your third set should be a higher weight at maximum effort to get out 8 reps. You should not be able to do a 9th rep. Your 4th set can be at a higher weight or same weight and just do as many as you can till failure. Rest about 2 mins before your next exercise. This workout should take about 45 mins.

After this workout you should do some type of traditional cardio using High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). For the interval cardio you will have a warm up period of 2-3 mins and then you will cycle doing high intensity for 30 or more secs with a rest phase of low intensity for about double the time of your high intensity time. You will go through this cycle 6-10 times and then have a cool down period. So if using a treadmill you could walk or jog for about 2-3 mins. Then you would repeatedly sprint for 30 secs followed by walking/jogging for 1 min for 6 to 10 intervals. Then you would walk/jog for another 2-3 mins.

Or instead of this, or in addition to this, you can put together a set of exercises that you rotate through doing as many as you can in a given amount of time with a set break between exercises. For example you can do the following exercises: mountain climbers, side to side push-ups, jump lunges, and burpees. You do as many reps for each exercise for 20/30 secs followed by 10/15 sec rest before going into the next exercise. Cycle through the entire group 2-4 times or until 4 mins are up.

One non-workout day should be devoted to stretching and one non-workout day should be devoted to core exercises.

This is just one way to devise such a workout. But something like this in my experience is very effective.

Mike,

I haven't made any significant cuts in my diet but I, at least thought I had cut back on calories. The scale tells me I clearly have not been. As far as calorie reduction what should I shoot for. At this point, I would like to focus more on building muscle than losing weight. (The goal is to get back to my high school strength) and then begin a maintenance lifting schedule with a heavier cardio regime. In the meantime though, I would (obviously) prefer to lose some weight. Are muscle building and weight loss irreconciable? What should I aim for in regards to calorie restriction?

Ellaspop,

I try to go nightly as my muscles allow, trading between Back/Biceps, Chest/Triceps, and legs (still don't really know where to work in shoulders). I target each group and then hammer them with different variations of excerises (ie seated row, dumbell row, standing row, high row). It's been an incredibly painful month but I'm already noticing differences in strength and muscle growth. More towards what you said, I do take breaks between sets but I try to increase the weight each time and go to exhaustion each time. By the end of the night I like to be struggling with light weights.

Yauncin,

I did try interval training on a treadmill however the treadmill couldn't exactly handle it. Something about the change of speeds and what I presume was my weight was a little too much them. I did try the total body three times a week routine but I found that strength gains were slow and I wasn't losing weight very fast. (That time around I was pretty strict with calorie restriction).

IMO, it's very obtainable. However, the closer you get to your goal weight the more difficult/near impossible it gets. Look at my progress pics, from 210-170's I lost weight and built muscle/strength. It was probably more strength building than muscle building. I think I gained SOME muscle but it APPEARED that I gained more as I started stripping some excess fat away. Once I got below 170 it was more weight loss than anything.

Weight loss is nothing but burning of fat. Lifting heavy weights involves burning more fat!!

Rage;
You could add Shoulders to either your back/bicep or chest/tricep days. I split my 3 workouts into Back/Chest, Arms/Shoulders (includes bicep and triceps), and Legs. You can look at some of my entries in the 'Did you exercise today' thread in the exercise section for my specific exercises. You might try the elliptical for HIIT. It is more like riding a bike where you control the speed by your effort instead of having to constantly adjust the speed of the machine by pushing buttons.

Yauncin;
I am a big believe in HIIT also. I had read a study that found the best split was 1:2 of High Intensity to Low Intensity. I currently do 20 seconds of sprint with 40 seconds of jog on the elliptical for the 1:2 ratio.

@rpmcduff
You are correct. I got my tabata times mixed up. I will edit my earlier post.

Although I do cardio kickboxing about 3-4X a week, I only do it for about half an hour, but I too have chosen to lift as my primary workout for losing weight. One of the reasons is that unlike cardio which only burns calories while you're doing it, weightlifting can actually continue to burn calories for about a day and half (36-38 hours) after you stop. SO for someone as busy as I am, it's good to know that I'm continuing to burn those cal's while I'm working on something else.

That being said, everybody is right here in that diet is key.

well.. yes and no
 

I've gone from 308 - 279.. and still losing
I'm much stronger than High school...
However I have a routine that allows me to get in and stay at 115-140 BPM for the entire routine. I incorporated 30 minutes for aerobics either before or after weights as well. getting me to 135-160 BPM depending on the activity. I'm using Giant sets with a push pull routine split... the exercise is important of course.. but diet, hydration and rest are at least as important...
Lean muscle burns way more calories than adipose tissue.. I'm running about 1700 calories + - 200... I use a diet log to track it .. and a nutritionist to keep my thinking fresh..

as far back as the 70's they truly big boys used more than weights to get what they needed done .. don't know your age .. but the older you get .. the more critical your specific actions to keep a level of fitness and strength ..IMO

Diet is the answer. There is no other way, period. Lifting is great but EVERY lifter will tell you that your diet and recovery is 80-90% of the game. If you eat like a lifter, weight will come off.

At 303lbs (assuming you are obese) you don't have to worry much about the details of weight lifting. You need to go to a gym and learn how to lift weights safely. Get your food intake sorted out and make sure you have a protein shake after each workout.
log your weight every week and as long as you are eating properly the weight will come off over time. Your weight will vary a lot due to water retention, stomach contents, etc so don't get too upset about gaining/loosing in the very short term. If you don't loose after a couple of weeks look at your food intake again.

Circuit training
 

If you don't have time to do cardio. The best routine to lose weight, and build some muscle would be a circuit. Moving from one excercise to another using moderately heavy weights. Such as doing flat bench presses for 10 reps, then bicep curls, then leg lifts then shoulder presses, then low pulley rows, then tricep press downs. The idea is to keep your heart rate up while working each muscle group and giving each group a small rest. This is how I started by doing this routine three to four times a week I spent no more than an hour each time in the gym. Each day I would the same muscle groups but with different exercises. Its a good starting point to build some strength but also strengthen the most important muscle you have.

Hi Rage,

Just wanted to share some info about weight loss and fitness. Most may think that weight loss has to do with cutting down on eating and do lots of exercise. Fighting fat is 80% healthy diet. Eat vegetables to help you feel full, drink plenty of water, get tempting foods out of your sight, stay busy -- you don't want to eat just because you're bored, eat only from a plate, while seated at a table. No grazing in front of the 'fridge. Don't skip meals!

Also getting enough sleep is key, getting 7 hours of sleep or 8 is the ideal time for a good biorhythm. When your biorhythms are off, you end up eating more. When you’re tired you produce more ghrelin, which triggers cravings for sugar and other fat-building foods. Losing sleep can also alter your hormone production, affecting your cortisol levels that cause insulin sensitivity, prime reasons for belly fat.

Some things that can aid you are vitamins, like vitamin C. Besides being a good way to counteract a cold, Vitamin C is also essential for making carnitine, a compound used by the body to turn fat into fuel, making this vitamin your fat burning friend.
You can also take Omega 3s. Some foods that contain this are Brazil nuts, tuna, salmon, flaxseed, walnuts, broccoli, and Brussels sprouts. Foods rich in this fat triggers the body and tells it to produce leptin. Leptin is great for appetite suppression, which will help to keep your portions smaller, but leptin also revs up your thyroid output, so, it speeds up your metabolism.

Add that to a good routine of exercise that includes cardio with intense exercises that focus on full-body movements, is a good way to go. :)

God Bless

I pretty much eat from the time I roll out of bed until the time my head hits the pillow, but it is all metered amounts (measuring spoons/cups/food scale) and it is ALL unprocessed carbs, lean proteins, and raw/steamed fruits/vegetables. I use a couple of health calculators to make sure my intake doesn't exceed my burn. The more you work, the more you can eat, but you can never eat more than you burn and lose weight, at least in my experience.