Resistance Training and Weight Management: Rationale and Efficacy

In addition to the impact of normal ageing on body composition, increasing levels of sedentariness reduce an individual’s ability to mobilise fat, resulting in an altered body composition characterised by increased fat mass, and more specifically an increased total and abdominal fat, and reduced muscle mass. While exercise, and aerobic exercise in general, has been promoted as a means to maintaining an appropriate body weight, aerobic exercise should not be considered as the golden standard to do so. This is because resistance training (RT) has an unsurpassed ability to improve lean mass along with other simultaneous improvements in multiple body composition parameters. An increased muscle mass is essential in that it is the amount of exercising muscle that determines the magnitude of lipolysis (fatty acid release from adipocytes) during exercise. In addition, an increased muscle mass results in an elevated basal metabolic rate (BMR) and resting metabolic rate (RMR), effectively increasing the amount of energy or calories utilised even at rest. RT is especially useful in the general population for weight management in that the ideal form of RT required for improvements in body composition is of moderate intensity, which reduces the risk of injury and improves adherence.