Cardio vs Weight Lifting: Which Is Better for Weight Loss?

If you are one of the people who wants to lose weight, I’m sure you’ve probably come across the question, ‘Should I do cardio or lift weights?’.

They are two very popular training formats, but it can be difficult to determine which would be most beneficial for you to achieve the best results possible.

Firstly let’s talk about Cardio……

Cardio will burn more calories DURING YOUR WORKOUT!!!

Research shows that you can use your body weight to estimate how many calories you will burn during different types of exercise, including cardio and weight training.

For most activities, the more you weigh, the more calories you will burn.

So, for example, If you weigh 73 kg, you will burn about 250 calories per 30 minutes of jogging at a steady pace.

If you were to slightly increase that pace to a mid-paced run, you would burn around 365 calories in 30 minutes.

Now, if you weight trained for the same amount of time, you might only burn around 130–220 calories. So obviously not as many.

The number of calories you burn during cardio exercise depends of your body weight and the intensity of the exercise. Typically, the amount of calories you burn during a cardio workout are larger than a weight training workout of the same duration.

Now, lets move onto weight training.

Although a weight-training workout doesn’t typically burn as many calories as a cardio workout, it has other important benefits.

Weight training is much more effective than cardio at building muscle, and muscle burns more calories at rest than some other tissues, including fat. So, the more muscle your body has, the more calories you will burn at rest.

Due to this it is widely believed that building muscle will help to boost your metabolism.

However, weight training also has other important calorie-burning benefits.

Research has shown that after a weight training session you will burn a lot more calories than you would during a cardio session.

There are even reports of resting metabolism staying elevated for up to 38 hours after weight training, while it is believed this is not possible by just performing cardio.

So, when you lift weights, the calorie burning effects aren’t limited to time spent exercising. You could even burn calories for days afterwards.

Usually, the more intense the workout, the more calories you will burn afterwards

In summary, weight training can improve your metabolism, but the changes aren’t huge. Also, weight training is much more effective at burning calories throughout the day after a workout.

So, they are both very effective ways of increasing the amount of calories you burn, both in and out of the gym. So, I would suggest you do a mix of both. Don’t be afraid of weight training. It will help you to burn calories when you’re not even exercising. Sounds good, ey?