Whether this is your first day or your one hundredth day at the gym, are you still not sure what’s best for fat loss - cardio or weight lifting?
Let me give you a little breakdown on how cardio and weight lifting both work for fat loss.
WHAT IS CARDIO
Cardio is any aerobic exercise that raises your heart rate, makes you a bit sweaty and makes you breath a bit heavy. Walking, running, biking and swimming are all examples of cardio exercises.
WHAT IS WEIGHT LIFTING
Weight lifting is any type of training which uses your muscles and has them working against some form of resistance. Over time, working against this resistance will cause your body to get stronger and muscles to develop. Weight lifting with barbells, dumbbells, bodyweight exercises, Crossfit and calisthenics are all examples of weight lifting.
Now that we know the difference between cardio and weight lifting, let’s see how they both impact fat loss.
But first, let's breakdown how we lose fat, so you see how your exercise of choice affects factors in.
Your body loses fat by being in a calorie deficit. A calorie deficit is when your eat fewer calories than you burn. If you’re eating fewer calories than your burning, your body has to use body fat for energy, and that energy comes from your body fat.
GREAT! SO HOW DOES EXERCISE AFFECT THIS?
So now let’s breakdown how both cardio and lifting weights make an impact on fat loss, and which is best for you. Let’s compare the difference in a cardio workout vs a weight lifting work out.
Let’s say your cardio session burned 400 calories. That’s great! You kicked ass. Your sweaty. Your our of breath. You had a great workout. But, in a cardio workout, the calories you burn during the workout are all of the calories you burn. If you burned a total amount of 400 during the workout, that's all the calorie burn you get. Cardio doesn't offer any greater affect on your body when it comes to losing fat.
That said, the benefit of cardio is that it can be done anywhere, anytime. Doing cardio improves your aerobic level, and the more cardio you do, the better you get at doing it. While that is a good benefit, it doesn't do anything more for greater fat loss.
With a weight lifting workout, during the workout you’re going to burn a lot fewer calories. Maybe half as many as the cardio workout, but the impact of building muscle has a significant impact on your body post workout. Even though you burned fewer calories during the workout itself, you continue to burn calories as you recover and rebuild muscle. This act of building new muscle burns calories.
But wait, we're not done yet. There’s even more calories you burn by weight lifting.
The more you lift weights, and get stronger and have more muscle mass, your body has to work harder to maintain this muscle. This work of maintaining muscle burns calories. So by having more muscle on your body, you burn more calories, even when you’re not working out.
This is why many athletes and bodybuilders eat so much. Not just to give them energy for their workouts, but they need the energy just to maintain their muscle.
For a lot of people, especially if you’re new to the gym you just want to see the number on the scale go down. Cardio may get the number on the scale down quicker, but if you are in it for the long term, having more muscle will keep burning fat.
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