Cardio vs. Weight Lifting

Are cardio workouts better for burning calories, or is weight training better? This is an old favorite from a line of questions that many people ask. Well, you will not like the answer, but you actually need both to really burn off a large amount of calories. Although doing both is the best thing, it does not have to be as hard you think.

Miriam Nelson, the author of “Strong Women Stay Slim”, has said that debates on burning calories can get complex really fast. She believes that if you are moving heavy weights, then you are most likely burning off more calories than if you are doing an aerobic workout. However, because you take breaks in between, strength training will actually burn less calories during a thirty minute workout than doing the aerobic exercises.

However, how much you workout is a major factor that you need to add in. There is a limit to how much weight lifting you can do. It is recommended by the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) that you should not lift weights more than only two or three times in one week. This is because your body needs time to heal in between workouts. The tears in muscle tissue that occur when you do training like this needs to be repaired. This is the key to acquiring the strength that you are working towards. On the other hand, cardiovascular workouts are different, because you can do those every day.

According to Miriam Nelson, when you are working out, you want to have a good balance of both a moderate- to vigorous-intensity aerobic workout and a moderate-intensity weight lifting workout. If you did decide to do one or the other, then doing the vigorous aerobics workout would be the one to burn more calories. So to have a good combination of both types of exercises, you should divide them up throughout your week. If you workout six days a week, like you should, you could do a one hour cardiovascular workout for three days in the week, and then on the other three days you could do both cardio and weight lifting for thirty minutes each.

There is a guide called the “Compendium of Physical Activities Tracking Guide” that supports Nelson and is also used by the ACSM, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other great authorities. They use this guide to classify the many different types and kinds of activities by their energy expenditure which is measured in metabolic equivalents (METs). This concludes that if an activity demands more METs than another, then that activity is harder and will help you to burn more calories.

For example, running at five mph demands the same METs (eight) as doing multiple exercises with very little rest and by using different groups of muscles. If you were to run at six mph, then you would need ten metabolic equivalents where as if you did heavy strength training, the MET is only six (light weight training would only require three). So all this means that you would have to work extra hard to achieve the same METs when you do weight training in comparison to doing a lower intensity cardio workout. Cardiovascular workouts are the only exercises that will help you to burn a higher amount of calories.

Although a cardio workout is going to burn more calories, there is one key element to losing weight and maintaining a healthy weight that the cardio vs. weight lifting debate has seemed to leave out. This is how many calories you are taking in during the day. You can burn off a thousand calories if you want, but you will not lose any weight if you eat to counterbalance the calories that you have just lost. That is something that you have to be careful about doing when you are exercising to lose weight. There are proven appetite suppressors that will help to control hunger, thus reducing the amount of calories that you consume.

There is also another factor that many people do not consider. This is the overall amount of exercise that you do during the entire day. You have to do both a planned exercise and continue to be active the rest of the day too. Just doing a thirty minute to an hour workout and nothing else the rest of the day will not have a good enough effect on the amount of calories you burn overall. You have to make sure that your regular everyday lifestyle keeps you moving instead of just sitting in front of the television or computer all day doing nothing.

So really, between cardio workouts and weight lifting, they both win, because when it really comes down to it, you need them both.