Weighted vests having a weight-loss moment

Suddenly I’m getting a lot of emails about using weighted vests for weight loss. Add weight to lose weight? It’s a thing right now. But does it work?

Exercising with more weight on can help you burn more calories and strengthen muscles. Anyone else wear ankle weights years ago to build up leg muscles for sports like soccer? I did, I did.

“Adding a weighted vest to walking, hiking, or mat-based cardiovascular activities like aerobics allows you to reap the benefits of low-impact exercise while ramping up the intensity,” Time magazine quoted one expert as saying.

“Wearing a weighted vest is a “great way to, at the very core element of it, increase the difficulty of whichever exercise you’re doing,” says Mathias Sorensen, an exercise physiologist at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Human Performance Center,” Time reports (this source is a different one than quoted above).

Food diary/weight loss app Lose It explains that “a 155-pound person can burn about 351 calories running at a speed of 6 miles per hour (a 10-minute mile) for 30 minutes without wearing a weighted vest.

“How many more calories does a weighted vest burn? If a person wears a vest that is 10 percent of their body weight—about 15 pounds in the case of a 155-pound person—they’ll burn 49 more calories for a total of 400 calories with the vest. And the faster you go while wearing a weight vest, the more calories you’ll burn.”

So enjoy, weight yourself down. But remember not to eat more afterward because you just had a great workout. Food, or beer or alcoholic drinks, should not eb your reward for exercising.