Cardio or lifting: What to do When You’re Short on Time at Her Active Life

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Cardio or lifting: What to do When You’re Short on Time

Posted September 6, 2007 at 05:00 PM by Shannon Clark

Section: Her Fitness, Athletics, Training Programs

Woman and Weights When starting out on a fat loss plan, one question that some people grapple with is what they should focus their efforts on. Should they spend more time on cardio or more work in weight lifting when they hit the gym?

Many tend to lean towards increasing their cardio activities, because when they hop on the machine it will give them a neat and tidy readout of exactly how many calories they burn. Since weight loss is highly dependant on number of calories burned versus number of calories consumed, it is only natural to choose the type of exercise that you think will be burning the most calories.

The thing to remember is that the calories you burn exercising are only going to account for a very small percentage of the total calories burned during the day. The rest is going to come from your basic metabolic rate coupled with non-intentional activities (getting up to walk to the store, preparing your meals, mowing the lawn and so on). If you can find a way to burn more calories doing those activities, this will be the key to making weight loss easier.

Strength training does just that.

When you strength train you start developing lean muscle tissue on your body, which just happens to be one of the most metabolically active tissues you can have. It takes a large number of calories to sustain this on a daily basis. Therefore, the more of it you have the more calories you will burn sitting on the couch while watching your favourite sitcom. This also explains why males tend to be able to eat a lot more than females. They have more muscle mass to support, so they require more calories on a daily basis.
Dumbbells
The second reason to explain why strength training is better is that this workout will also cause an increase in the metabolic rate during the recovery process. This is traditionally known as EPOC (excess post oxygen consumption) and occurs immediately after a lifting session. With all this taken into consideration, you will likely find that strength training is what will burn the most calories at the end of the day, thus further improving your chances for weight loss and a healthy physique.

Finally, strength training in itself promotes the maintenance (and addition) of lean muscle mass, whereas lots of cardio work makes the body want to get rid of the muscle that is already present. For example, if you run alot, the body is going to sense that this job would be much easier if it didn’t have to lug such a large amount of muscle over that distance. The result? Your body will start to eat away at your muscle, trying to become lighter and more efficient at doing this type of training.

So if you find yourself short on time and trying to decide what to do for a workout, consider putting more of those minutes into weigh training, rather than slugging away on the treadmill.