What does lifting heavy do?

Lifting heavy helps increase your strength (as you are seeing) and, depending on whether you are cutting or bulking, it will help maintain/preserve muscle mass, or increase it.

Cutting = eating at a deficit so as to lose weight, optimally to lose fat and not muscle.
Bulking = eating at a surplus so as to gain muscle mass.

As for abs: One thing to recognize is that you cannot target fat loss. When your body starts to burn fat from your body, it will take the fat from all over. Your stomach may feel bigger, and actually be bigger, because you're developing the muscles underneath the fat. The muscles get bigger, the fat stays the same, so you will gain size as a whole.

Lifting Heavy: this is basically a requirement for building strength. The "toned" look you are after is a product of muscle mass and low body fat percentage. Unfortunately you cannot really do both at the same time (add muscle and cut fat). It's more or less a one-or-the-other approach. Most often what happens is people choose to cut first, eating at a deficit and cutting body fat. To ensure that more fat is lost and less muscle is lost during this process of cutting, strength training - lifting heavy - is done to preserve the muscle you already have (because if you don't lift, you will lose fat AND muscle).

Once you've reached a low enough body fat percentage to be happy, then you can choose to add additional muscle, if you wish, but eating a slight caloric surplus and continuing to lift heavy.

You do not need to "blast out" cardio to lose body fat. Walking is an effective enough cardio exercise to sufficiently create a larger calorie deficit for weight loss.

What you want to do, ideally, is eat at a slight caloric deficit, and then create a larger deficit through exercise. Everything you do, from strength training to yoga to walking or running, will burn calories.

Maintain a consistent deficit and you will lose weight.

I'm actually at 10 lbs now. I'm slowly increasing the size and it is working. I'm 5 feet and started between 104/105 lbs. Yes, you can compare my arms to a toddler and no I'm not kidding. I did my first measurement 2 days ago and I increased 1 and 1/2 inch.

The problem is when I gain weight, I only gain weight on my waist and my thigh area. I don't think I have gained any weight since my high school days around arms or neck or around my wrist area. If any, maybe 1/2 a inch around my arm.

But since when you have to lose belly fat, you have to lose all around, I said to my trainer 'let's tone up my body and lose body fat and increase some muscle'. So I'm working on it.

Problem is I have completed my month of workouts and after the measurement, I don't think I lost any weight around my waist. I have gained thigh, calf, arms, neck, and chest area. Shouldn't I be seeing "SOME" result on my waist now? I mean even if it a half a inch or even less. In fact I think I have gained half 1 inch more.

So my confusion if lifting is really helping. Am I targeting the correct muscle? Am I not eating right? When should I expect to see any result? I'm just not sure "WHERE and HOW" to improve. I'm not so much focused on the number on the scale but the inches on the measuring tape.

. However, no improvement on my abs. I feel as if my stomach has gotten even bigger.

Also, literally learned about eating deficit yesterday. I was barely eating 1100 and my intake should be 1378. Bumped it up today. Could it be that my diet was too low for me to lose all that fat?

I'm not saying this to be rude, so hear me out. You can lift more than 10 lbs. You say you're "petite," but a toddler can lift more than 3 lbs, which is the weight you say you started at, so just how petite are you?

Just a cute story. My 3 year old went with me to lift one day. Without prompting, he walked over to the dumbbells, picked up some 5's (they may have been 3's, can't remember) and started doing suitcase deadlifts....with good form! I don't even do those!

cute-

it's hysterical how many people don't know how to pick stuff up- it's the most basic and natural thing to need to know how to do.

good job!!!!


Also why is this not an answer

"what does heavy lifting do"
<makes you awesome>

Lifting heavy helps increase your strength (as you are seeing) and, depending on whether you are cutting or bulking, it will help maintain/preserve muscle mass, or increase it.

Cutting = eating at a deficit so as to lose weight, optimally to lose fat and not muscle.
Bulking = eating at a surplus so as to gain muscle mass.

As for abs: One thing to recognize is that you cannot target fat loss. When your body starts to burn fat from your body, it will take the fat from all over. Your stomach may feel bigger, and actually be bigger, because you're developing the muscles underneath the fat. The muscles get bigger, the fat stays the same, so you will gain size as a whole.

Lifting Heavy: this is basically a requirement for building strength. The "toned" look you are after is a product of muscle mass and low body fat percentage. Unfortunately you cannot really do both at the same time (add muscle and cut fat). It's more or less a one-or-the-other approach. Most often what happens is people choose to cut first, eating at a deficit and cutting body fat. To ensure that more fat is lost and less muscle is lost during this process of cutting, strength training - lifting heavy - is done to preserve the muscle you already have (because if you don't lift, you will lose fat AND muscle).

Once you've reached a low enough body fat percentage to be happy, then you can choose to add additional muscle, if you wish, but eating a slight caloric surplus and continuing to lift heavy.

You do not need to "blast out" cardio to lose body fat. Walking is an effective enough cardio exercise to sufficiently create a larger calorie deficit for weight loss.

What you want to do, ideally, is eat at a slight caloric deficit, and then create a larger deficit through exercise. Everything you do, from strength training to yoga to walking or running, will burn calories.

Maintain a consistent deficit and you will lose weight.

^^Listen to this. Yeah no one else really needs to add a comment. Lol

Lifting heavy helps increase your strength (as you are seeing) and, depending on whether you are cutting or bulking, it will help maintain/preserve muscle mass, or increase it.

Cutting = eating at a deficit so as to lose weight, optimally to lose fat and not muscle.
Bulking = eating at a surplus so as to gain muscle mass.

As for abs: One thing to recognize is that you cannot target fat loss. When your body starts to burn fat from your body, it will take the fat from all over. Your stomach may feel bigger, and actually be bigger, because you're developing the muscles underneath the fat. The muscles get bigger, the fat stays the same, so you will gain size as a whole.

Lifting Heavy: this is basically a requirement for building strength. The "toned" look you are after is a product of muscle mass and low body fat percentage. Unfortunately you cannot really do both at the same time (add muscle and cut fat). It's more or less a one-or-the-other approach. Most often what happens is people choose to cut first, eating at a deficit and cutting body fat. To ensure that more fat is lost and less muscle is lost during this process of cutting, strength training - lifting heavy - is done to preserve the muscle you already have (because if you don't lift, you will lose fat AND muscle).

Once you've reached a low enough body fat percentage to be happy, then you can choose to add additional muscle, if you wish, but eating a slight caloric surplus and continuing to lift heavy.

You do not need to "blast out" cardio to lose body fat. Walking is an effective enough cardio exercise to sufficiently create a larger calorie deficit for weight loss.

What you want to do, ideally, is eat at a slight caloric deficit, and then create a larger deficit through exercise. Everything you do, from strength training to yoga to walking or running, will burn calories.

Maintain a consistent deficit and you will lose weight.

I think I love you....This is literally every question I've always asked and you have answered it so beautifully...It finally made sense to me. :flowerforyou: