On a mission for fat loss? The great news is that weight lifting offers the perfect opportunity to jump start slow and sluggish fat burning and see better results.

With strength training workouts, you’ll not only burn a good amount of calories during the session itself, but you’ll continue to burn calories at a faster pace for hours after the session is completed as well. If you want to burn fat while you sleep, weight lifting is the route to go.

This said, you can take a standard weight lifting session and really transform it into a powerful fat fighter with a few smart tips and tricks.

Here’s what you need to know.

Stack Exercises Back To Back

Supersets are one of the best ways to crank your fat burning into high gear. Simply perform one exercise and then immediately after that, do another exercise. Once that’s finished, then you can rest before moving on.

Supersets are an excellent way to boost the overall intensity of your workout, getting your heart rate up and ensuring you reap great cardiovascular benefits.

Shorten Your Rest Periods

Start timing those rest periods! Don’t make the mistake of going to the water cooler and chatting with another fitness enthusiast or checking your social media stream between sets.

Keep those rest periods short and intense. They shouldn’t last any longer than 30-60 seconds when fat loss is the goal.

Focus On Your Big Lifts

While any weight lifting exercise is going to be better than no weight lifting exercise, some moves pay off more than others.

Your compound exercises including the bench press, bent over rows, squats, deadlifts, lunges, and pull-ups will always burn more calories per set than isolation exercises such as bicep curls, tricep extensions, lateral raises, and so forth.

Make these a priority in your workout program. If you are doing too many isolation exercises, you may be getting a good muscle ‘pump’ during the workout session, but you won’t be optimizing your total calorie burn.

Put your main compound exercises near the start of the workout session when you are feeling fresh and can give maximum effort. Then once those are done, you can add a few isolation exercises at the end.

Add More Calories

Yes, that’s right. Eating more can actually mean burning more. How does this work?

If you are performing an intense strength training workout program, you are giving your body the potential to build lean muscle mass. That is, if you eat enough calories to support this goal.

When you build more lean muscle mass, this will then lead to superior total daily calorie burning because muscles is such metabolically active tissue.

So while the scale may actually go up if you build lean muscle mass, the truth is that you could be burning body fat and building muscle, thus changing your overall body composition for the better.

Your body needs energy to build that lean muscle mass tissue however, so this means eating more.

Always keep in mind that starvation or very low calorie diets are not the fastest route to success with fat burning. At times, eating more can mean burning more. Fuel your body right and it will reward you.

So there you have the top ways that you can boost your calorie burn from your weight lifting workout sessions. Ideally you should be lifting weights at least three times per week as part of your overall workout routine, possibly lifting four to five times per week if your body has the recovery capacity to do so.

Stay committed to weight lifting, designing your sessions correctly and you will see excellent results.