You go to HIIT 3-5 days a week and sometimes go for a long run. Your nutrition is “pretty good” but if you know you are going to be going off track you make sure to get in a tough cardio session that day. You feel like you are doing it right according to what the influencers tell you but you are no longer seeing the progress you seek. This sound familiar? Well we have a solution to your problem. You need to be doing more resistance training a.k.a. lifting weights! Let’s break down why this is true.
Let’s look at one important aspect of what you have been doing. On days where you planning on eating whatever or having some drinks, you choose more cardio. This is an all too common approach by most of us. It makes sense that you would want to try to balance this calorie in vs. calorie out ratio but who is winning in this game? You are creating a relationship that is based on suffering for a reward and psychologically that does not sound like a healthy or sustainable way to go through life.
What if there were another way? Do you know what your resting metabolic rate is? This is something every human has. Guess what? This is your ticket to getting out of that cardio for burning calories cycle. Your resting metabolic rate is the number of calories required for the body to be at rest. Training endless endurance pales in comparison to the power of a large RMR.
So how do you increase this resting metabolic rate? You increase your lean muscle tissue through lifting weights! Muscle tissue needs a ton of caloric energy to sustain at rest. RMR is the caloric burn that is present all the time, exercising or not. Change that mindset around trying to burn calories with more activity and focus on building the body that will burn calories for you while you are doing nothing! Once again, you won’t add this lean muscle by doing more HIIT classes, you have to lift and often!