Burning calories is the wrong metric

You don’t strength train to burn calories. You do burn a few calories in order to strength train. But that isn’t the primary metric for measuring progress, or the value of what’s being achieved.

Measuring calories burnt while strength training is a bit like going to a library to enjoy the silence. You primarily went there to read a book, not for the quiet.

Here are ten more useful things you do in a gym than burning calories:

1. Make your heart more efficient.
2. Increase your muscle mass.
3. Increase the amount of force a muscle can produce.
4. Improve the resilience of all your connective tissue — tendons, ligaments, cartilage. All of it benefits.
5. Improve your bone density.
6. Practise a very specific pattern to get better at it in a controlled setting. Jumping, punching, rotating — all benefit from deliberate practice.
7. Improve your brain’s capacity to communicate with your body to produce movement.
8. Make yourself more physically resilient.
9. Make daily tasks easier. A 3 kg bag of groceries is a lot lighter when you can carry 25–30 kg in each arm.
10. Foster a lot more confidence and physical independence.

And there’s more. Better body composition, better general health, slower cognitive decline. Things that “200 calories burnt in 40 minutes” cannot begin to capture.

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