The More Effective Method to Losing Fat

When it comes to burning fat, the most common thing that people will do is cardio. Cardio is a form of working out that involves increasing your heart rate to lose Calories. Examples of cardio include jogging, biking, and even walking. This common misconception occurs because cardio allows for you to lose the most Calories at one time but is it actually melting the fat off your body? The answer is no, but to better burn fat, weight lifting and resistance training is the superior method.

There are several reasons why weightlifting is more effective at burning fat than cardio, the first one is that after the workout, when you lift you continue to burn Calories. Exercise physiologist Mike Bracko of Calgary, Alberta says that when you decide to strength train rather than do cardio, you are shocking your body and you can burn an extra 25% on top of the Calories that you have already burned. In “Cardio Vs. Weights” by Natalie Gingerich, she puts this idea into numbers to show how this can affect the person working out. “.. if you burn 160 Calories doing a 20 minute strength circuit, you will actually burn 200 [Calories] by the time you’ve gone on with your day.

Another reason weightlifting is more effective than cardio is because it improves your basal metabolic rate. Your basal metabolic rate is the amount of Calories you burn when not doing physical activity such as Calories that burn to make your heart pump or to make you breath. A study was conducted by Gary R. Hunter which involved African American women and European-American women. Some members were put into a control group where only their diet was altered, but they did not exercise. The other two groups also dieted, but one group did aerobic training such as jogging or biking and the other group did resistance training. In all groups they lost weight and fat, but only the resistance training group gained some muscle. However, the results that are really interesting about this study was about the resting energy expenditure, which is also known as the basal metabolic rate. In the control group and the aerobic training group, their resting energy expenditure decreased. But in the resistance training group they actually increased their resting energy expenditure. This shows how when doing cardio (or aerobic training) your basal metabolic rate decreases which means you lose less Calories when not working out or doing anything physically.

These are just two points on how weight lifting can better burn fat and lose Calories than cardio. Cardio also can be boring since there isn’t much variability while there are lots of different movements for lifting weight. To conclude, weight lifting is the superior method to burning fat and losing weight.