Weight Lifting Versus Cardio For Weight Loss – What’s The Optimal Choice?
For those of you who are on the hunt for the best weight loss program to use, one question that might be running through your mind is how to format your workouts. Should you primarily be focusing your efforts on cardio training or would weight lifting be a better course of action?
When thinking about weight loss, it’s usually most common for people to associate weight lifting with building muscle and cardio training for fat loss. This is understandable since when you build muscle you do typically gain weight – muscle mass, and when you do cardio, you are burning calories off. Since weight loss is a function of burning calories off and creating a deficit, it only stands to reason then that cardio should equate to fat loss.
There’s are two important things that individuals who think like this are overlooking, however.
The Long-Term Weight Lifting Potential
The big way that weight lifting is going to help with fat loss is the fact that when you build more lean muscle mass, you boost your metabolism so you burn more calories 24 hours a day. While you may be burning calories while you’re doing your cardio training, after the workout is over you aren’t going to be burning much more than you would have if you wouldn’t have done that cardio in the first place.
Since your metabolic rate actually contributes the greatest calorie burn throughout the course of the day, doing what you can to boost this is really going to help the process over the long run.
Body Composition Changes
The second big reason why weight lifting is ideal for fat loss is because while cardio can get you burning calories and losing weight, it’s not going to do a great deal to actually help change your body composition. So, what you’re left with is a smaller version of your current self.
If you have a good amount of muscle tone to begin with this may be fine, but more than likely you’ll still be somewhat ’soft’ looking. To increase muscle definition and look more firm, you want to perform weight lifting since that will remove the fat while keeping the muscle tissue in tact.
So, next time you’re debating whether you should fill your workout session with cardio or weights, give the weights a second though. It may not seem like you’re burning as many calories since you don’t get that handy read-out telling you how many you’ve burned, but in reality it’s going to really do a lot more for your progress over the long term.
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