Can strength training improve metabolism for boys

The answer is yes, but it is far from as impressive as the "practice once and lie down for three days to lose weight" uploaded online. Many people actually have quite a misunderstanding about its improvement effect.

For example, the calories we burn while lying down are resting metabolism, which is equivalent to the standby power consumption of a mobile phone. Muscles are practical apps with high energy consumption in the background, while fat is a useless cache that takes up memory but consumes little power. For every additional kilogram of pure muscle, you can burn 10-15 more calories by lying down every day. Doesn’t sound like much, right? I have a friend who has been practicing for a year. He used to be as thin as a bamboo pole at 120 pounds, but now his body fat at 140 pounds is still stable at 14%. Calculated, the daily resting consumption is almost 60 calories more than before, which is almost the amount of half a bottle of ordinary Coke.

Many people may say that the extra consumption after strength training should be a big one, right? This thing is technically called peroxygen consumption (EPOC). To put it bluntly, after training, the body still has to expend energy to replenish glycogen and repair muscles, and the metabolism will be much higher than usual. In fact, the academic community has different conclusions about this. Early studies said that this high metabolic state can be maintained for 24-48 hours, and some recent experiments said that if the training intensity is not enough, EPOC can be maintained for up to 3 or 4 hours, and the additional consumption is less than 100 calories. In fact, it really depends on how you practice. If every time you go to the gym, sit there and watch short videos for ten minutes between sets, and bench press 5kg for half a day, there is really no additional benefit. If you practice a cycle of compound movements such as heavy squats, deadlifts, and bench presses, and only rest for 90 seconds between sets. After the exercise, your whole body is sweating and your legs are weak. Then it is normal to burn more than 200 calories in the next 12 hours, which is about the amount of a small bowl of white rice.

I used to take care of a 178-pound male student who weighed 190 pounds at first. He just wanted to lose weight quickly. He climbed stairs for 40 minutes every day and ate very strictly. He lost 12 pounds in the first month. After that, he didn’t move at all for three weeks. He almost gave up. I asked him to add strength training three times a week. He practiced basic compound movements of the chest, back and legs for 40 minutes the first time. He ate exactly the same as before and did not add any oxygen. He lost 7 pounds in three weeks. He said that the most obvious feeling was that he was not hungry after eating a snack at 3 o'clock in the afternoon until get off work, but now his stomach is a little empty after 4 o'clock, which is an intuitive reaction of the metabolism.

Of course, don’t think that just because of this metabolic improvement, you can build whatever you want. I once had a friend who gained 3 kilograms of muscle after training for half a year. He felt that he had a high metabolism and was fearless. After training every day, he would buy two skewers of grilled pork belly and iced Coke. As a result, his body fat increased from 17 to 23 in three months. The metabolic improvement brought by the increase in muscle was not enough to fill the gap between his teeth with the two extra bites of meat he ate. Some people worry that metabolism will drop back after stopping training. This is indeed true. Muscles will definitely be lost slowly if they are not used for a long time. If you stop training for three or four months without touching iron, the muscle mass will drop back to the original level, and the metabolism will naturally drop accordingly. However, as long as you take an hour or two a week to practice once or twice to maintain it, the gains can be maintained. It is much easier to persist than taking time to run five kilometers every day.

To put it bluntly, the effect of strength training on improving metabolism is never a bug that makes you lose weight while lying down. It is more like installing a voltage regulator for weight management. After long-term training, you will not gain weight after eating a few more bites, and it is not easy to encounter a stuck plateau when losing fat. Boys are easier to gain muscle than girls, so this account is not a loss no matter how you calculate it.