rev metabolish

Illustration: David Wyffels

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1. Rev Your Metabolism to Shed Unwanted Weight

The best way to do this is to add strength training to your exercise regimen. Your body has to expend energy in order to repair muscle fibers after each strength-training workout, which means the more weight-based workouts you do and the more muscle you build, the more calories your body torches when you're not breaking a sweat. (That's right—muscle equals calories being burned while you're on the couch catching up on The Affair.)

Weight training also ensures that as you slim down, you're losing fat, not muscle. When Penn State University researchers put overweight people on a reduced-calorie diet and divided them into three groups—one that didn't exercise, another that performed aerobic exercise 3 days a week and a third that did both aerobic exercise and weight training 3 days a week—they found that while members in each group lost about 21 pounds on average, the lifters shed roughly 6 more pounds of fat than those who didn't pump iron.

Don't forget that in addition to moves using free-weights or weight machines, actions that use your own body for resistance (squats, pushups, lunges, planks, etc.) count too.

Here are some of our favorite strength-training routines and exercises.

The Back-to-Basics Workout That Never Fails

An 8-Minute Circuit That Fights Weight Gain

4 Underrated Moves You Should Be Doing More Often

3 Exercises to Master for Tank Top–Ready Arms

The No-Equipment Workout You Can Do at Home