Losing weight can often feel like an uphill battle, even when it seems as though you’re
doing everything right.
You can eat clean, manage your portion sizes and get plenty of regular exercise, and it
might still feel as though you’re not seeing the results that you might have hoped for.
If you’re struggling to see any positive change when you step on that bathroom scale,
it might be a sign that it’s time to shake up your workout strategy.
When starting a new workout plan, the first question you might be asking yourself is this:
should I focus on cardio or on lifting weights?
Today, we’re going to see which of these two exercise techniques are more effective
when it comes to losing weight.
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To determine whether cardio or weight lifting is the superior exercise technique when it
comes to weight loss, we need to break both forms of exercise down to their bare essentials
and examine their pros and cons in detail.
Let’s start with one of the more obvious questions: which of these two exercises helps
you burn more calories?
According to scientific research, 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise, such as running,
jogging or cycling, will net you somewhere between 250 to 365 calories, depending on
your weight and level of intensity.
By contrast, taking part in a weight training exercise for a similar amount of time will
instead only yield about 130 to 220 calories burnt in a single session.
With this in mind, it seems pretty apparent that cardio exercise helps you to burn more
calories, at least in short bursts.
So that’s one point for cardio!
While cardiovascular exercise might help you burn more calories on a session to session
basis, that’s no reason to sleep on weight training as a weight loss aid.
Weight training might not burn as many calories, it does help you to build and develop muscle
mass.
By building up your body’s stores of lean muscle, this will help your body to burn more
calories overall, even during periods of time in which you’re not actively exercising.
This is because muscle increases your resting metabolism and burns more calories during
periods of rest than fat.
This means that while workouts that focus on weight lifting won’t make you see results
quite as quickly as cardio, it will help you to lose weight as more of a long term investment
of sorts by making it easier for your body to burn more calories over time.
With that in mind, that brings our score of 1 to 1.
With the score all tied up, it seems as though you can’t necessarily go wrong when it comes
to which form of exercise you prefer.
While cardio will help you burn through calories and lose weight at a faster rate (assuming
you stick with it), weight training exercise helps you build more muscle which will help
with your overall weight loss in the long term.
But maybe, just maybe, figuring out which of these two modes of exercise are “best”
might not be the best way to analyze them: so far, we’ve been treating cardio and weight
training as a “one or the other” style binary, but really, what’s stopping you
from doing both?
In fact, it’s been suggested that relying on multiple types of exercising might be the
best course of action to make the most of your weight loss journey.
Additionally, there are other forms of physical exercise you can try out besides these two
in order to maximize on your weight loss potential.
For example, one other option of weight loss exercise you can look into is high intensity
interval training, otherwise known as HIIT.
This particular style of physical activity revolves around alternating between periods
of extremely high intensity exercise followed by periods of lowered intensity as a chance
for the body to recover.
A high intensity interval workout typically runs somewhere between 10 to 30 minutes per
session, and can be applied to a wide variety of different exercise activities such as biking,
jumping rope, or sprinting, as just a few examples.
In addition to yielding similar weight loss results compared to those yielded by traditional
cardio exercises, high intensity interval training may also burn more calories by comparison
as well.
According to one study, HIIT exercise was found to burn somewhere between 25 to 30 percent
more calories compared to other forms of exercise.
So what can we glean from all of this information?
Well, based on the facts we’ve broken down, there definitely seems to be no “wrong answer”
when it comes to exercise options, at least out of the one’s presented in this video.
If you’re looking to burn lots of fat and lose weight, try cardio.
If your end goal is not only to lose fat but also build up your muscle mass, try some weight
training exercise.
If you really want to push yourself and speed up your results, you might even feel inclined
to attempt some high intensity training techniques in your workout as well.
If you really want to be working out to your full potential though, then your best course
of action might be to incorporate multiple forms of physical activity into your workout
regime.
Did you find this video helpful?
For all you gym nuts, fitness junkies and weekend warriors listening to this, what are
some workout techniques and strategies that you feel have worked best for you?
We’d love to hear your experiences and feedback, so be sure to let us know in the comment section
below and help us to keep this conversation going.