Weight Training Does it Better -- Or Does It?
Muscle burns more fat.
Weight training is increasingly recommended as a fat-busting tool because some experts say extra muscle burns more energy than body fat at rest, so if you develop more muscle and have a higher muscle to fat ratio than before, you must burn extra energy and more stored fat as a result. This is true and has been shown in metabolic studies. However, the differences are not that dramatic; perhaps less than a few tens of calories per day for each pound of muscle increased, for most people.
Does that mean you shouldn’t worry about weight training? Certainly not, because weight training has many other benefits for health and performance, not the least of which is extra muscle. It’s just that this advantage has been somewhat overstated and we need to get this fat burning thing right in order to develop the best weight loss and performance programs.
Getting the afterburn.
Okay, so extra muscle does not provide that much advantage, but what about the afterburn? The 'afterburn', or the amount of energy you use after you stop exercising, has been promoted as an important slimming idea. If you can get afterburn, which is really another way of saying your metabolism increases for several hours or longer after a particular exercise, then that’s a bonus because you burn fat during the exercise and after you cease as well. Will the fun ever stop!
However, this idea has recently been reconsidered as well. An article in the Journal of Sports Science in December last year reported that despite some promising early studies of this effect, the idea has not proven to be as useful as first thought.
Exercise scientists call this afterburn effect EPOC, which stands for Excess Post-exercise Oxygen Consumption. The authors of that study say that the high intensities required -- greater than about 75 percent of maximum heart rate -- are probably beyond what most people wanting to lose weight can cope with in sustained exercise. So the afterburn advantage from lifting weights or running fast is there, but you need to be able to sustain that intensity, which means a lot of hard work. No secrets there, I'm sure.
Strength training
has so many great things going for it that I'm a big fan -- increased strength, more muscle and body shape, better balance and bone density and improved functionality across all facets of human movement. But let’s be honest, we all need aerobic or cardio training as well. It has its own set of important functional benefits including general fitness, elastic arteries, increased heart and lung function and lower blood pressure to name a few benefits.
Lifting weights
can easily move us into the high intensity exercise zone above the 75 percent effort required to get some afterburn, but it's only for short bursts. This is not consistent, steady-state effort and does not generally burn as much energy as a good run on the treadmill, cycle or row machine at moderate pace. For example, here are the energy expenditure calculations for weights versus cardio for one hour of exercise from the NAT Nutritional Analysis Tools web site. I've based this on a 150 pound person (just under 70 kilograms).
1. Running at 8 minutes a mile pace (5 min/km) -- burn 852 calories (kilocalories)
2. Weight lifting, vigorous, free weights or machines -- burn 409 calories (kilocalories)
I’ve tried to line these activities up for effort so that the comparison is worthwhile. Whenever I check these numbers it astounds me because I run and I lift weights, and sometimes I feel much fresher after a run than going for it in the gym with sub-10 RM (repetition maximum) and three sets of ten exercises. Nevertheless, the numbers always come out the same with any reputable energy calculator. Sustained aerobics always spends about twice the energy of weight training in a comparable comparison. You can see from this why cardio sessions are important for fat loss.