A few fitness industry myths...
Eating more smaller meals in a day does not increase your metabolic rate
The workout you described is more about body building or putting on muscle- lots of reps low weight- if you don’t want to put on muscle and want to be more functional, go 80-90% of your 1 rep max and do 5 sets of 5, or 6 sets of 3, etc etc. The strength training is good because you won’t put on too much mass (it’ll be denser though), being big isn’t ideal if you want to be mobile. As long as you don’t overeat and keep to high protein, healthy fats, low carbs you’ll become very strong but won’t look it.
One of the most efficient lifting regimes is push, pull, legs, rest repeat. If you’re doing solely strength training, I wouldn’t recommend working out more than 3 times a week, your CNS needs rest. Don’t do repeated exercises every day, your muscles probably won’t recover as efficiently.
Also, you do need not much strength at all for towing or swimming. Also,do a warmup before every session (shoulder, hips, knees, ankles etc) and only stretch after the workout. I’m not a fitness expert but IMO, *personally*, if you did 3X heavy functional weight training a week (squats, deadlifts, bench press, overhead press, weighted pull-ups) and did 3 cardio sessions- long low volume sessions if you want to lower weight, HIIT if you want to lose fat but retain muscle, you would be very fit as long as you did it consistently and your diet is good. Diet is way more important though.
@wnissenif you want to lose weight, do long low volume cardio like spin bike, run, swim, stair climbers, even just walk. If you cut out all the crap that people generally eat, and do cardio no more than 6 times a week. Stop off with 10 mins, then increase it every session while you adjust. Remember low intensity to burn weight off. Doing HIIT will not burn fat as well, but will retain muscle and increase cardiovascular.