Weight Lifting and Cardio Effectiveness

For weight loss: control your food intake.
Most cardio will probably burn more calories than strength training, but strength training will help you look better at goal weight 😉 The burn from extra muscle is pretty minimal, actually. But it's great for your health, bone strength.

While I am certainly in the 'exercise to eat more' camp myself, I also exercise to manage my stress, because I enjoy fitness level... I do hope you're also exercising because it's good for you and you enjoy it?
If you want to stay at your goal weight after you reach it, a lot of people find it's important to keep an exercise routine going, not just exercise to lose weight. Do what you enjoy! I would recommend doing strength training and something that works your cardiovascular system for the health benefits, but the best exercise is ultimately the exercise you'll actually do 🙂

The general advice to maximize your lifting is to do it separately from a long cardio session. Do brief cardio as a warm-up before lifting, that's good.

bengerv wrote: »

Hello all.

So I was doing just cardio (walking on an incline treadmill for 30 minutes a day). Then I threw in lifting for 20-30 minutes then a cool down with 10 minutes of the walking and I found that, both together, they have dropped my weight quicker. Anyone else find this? Is it better to lift or do cardio for a lot of weight loss? I know lifting gives you muscle, which increases how much you burn per day...

Thanks!

If you were walking only...and then added lifting, you've increased activity. When you increase activity, you burn more calories. If calories are kept constant, you would have made your deficit bigger with more activity. The same would happen with any increase in activity, where calories in are kept constant.

I personally keep my fitness and weight management objectives somewhat divorced. I don't exercise specifically for weight management...exercise in general probably has the biggest impact on your overall health and well-being. For basic physical competency and health, it is recommended by most health bodies to get in 150 hours of light cardiovascular exercise and 2x per week of some kind of resistance training at bare minimum. As weight management goes, exercise can definitely help, but weight management is easier manipulated with your diet itself. Inevitably you're going to miss exercise days whether that's due to just life happening, injury, illness, or whatever...there will be times for most people when exercise just can't be consistently relied upon whereas diet and calories in can be manipulated to your goals on a very consistent level provided you're willing to do so.

Even adding muscle fast is a slow thing, in pounds per week terms. On top of that, at rest a pound of muscle only burns a tiny number of calories per day more than a pound of fat. Estimates vary, but the more solid estimates I've seen are something like 6-13 calories per day per pound of muscle, 2-4 calories per day per pound of fat.

I did the arithmetic at one point, and it looked like if a person gained muscle mass at a really good rate (maybe 1-2 pounds a month), then each month they could eat something like one or two cherry tomatoes more daily at the end of that month from the new calorie burn. Whee.

I'd speculate that muscular people do burn more calories than that daily compared with similar-size less muscular ones . . . but largely because moving more is more fun and natural when in better physical condition, more difficult and tiring when out of shape.

Most of us burn dramatically more calories in an average week doing daily life stuff than we do in intentional exercise, and increasing daily life movement (in ways that don't require much extra time investment) can potentially have a bigger payoff than tradeoffs between exercise types.

I'm in agreement that exercise is for fun, health, improved fitness, and that sort of thing. It does let a person eat a little more while losing weight at the same rate, but even that's not dramatic.

I may be biased, because I was very active for a dozen years while staying overweight/obese. The exercise calories rarely accounted for more than the equivalent of a peanut butter sandwich on decent whole-grain bread, or even some less-filling things like a few tablespoons of mayo or frying oil . . . way less than one of those larger sweet Starbucks coffee drinks. When not calorie counting, it was super easy to eat that much more without even noticing. (I didn't materially increase exercise to lose weight, just managed my food intake better.)

I do have a higher than average maintenance calorie requirement now than similar-sized others in my demographic, and I suspect part of the reason is more muscle mass than average . . . plus more fitness so more mobility than average. But that's the result of 20 years of being more active exercise-wise than average.

Some of our habit changes in this realm are truly long term investments: Slow, incremental improvements, but they add up to huge differences over decades.

So: Do some cardio, and some lifting. Cardio tends to burn more calories per minute, lifting builds useful strength and limits muscle loss during weight loss. Gaining lots of muscle mass is very, very unlikely while losing weight (at any reasonably satisfying rate). Strength training does have a higher afterburn (EPOC, excess post-exercise oxygen consumption) than most cardio, but that's as a percentage of the calories burned in the workout. There again, the difference in the actual number of calories is likely to be small.

Retroguy2000 wrote: »

AnnPT77 wrote: »

I did the arithmetic at one point, and it looked like if a person gained muscle mass at a really good rate (maybe 1-2 pounds a month), then each month they could eat something like one or two cherry tomatoes more daily at the end of that month from the new calorie burn. Whee.

I agree with the rest of your post generally.

For me, I estimate my maintenance is at least 130 calories higher than the average person of my age, height and same weight. Some of that is from increased muscle at rest. I don't know how much more I have than the average, let's say to keep things simple it's in the 10-20 pounds range. That's worth about 40-80 more calories burned daily.

Then there's the diet to consider. People who aren't lifting or doing a specific diet plan are probably getting far less protein than I am, which is 0,7g-0.75g per pound per day. Say that gets me about 70g more protein than the average person. That's 280 calories in additional protein, with a thermic effect about 20% more than the same calories from carbs or fat, so that's worth another 55 calories.

Net result, my maintenance is about 100-130 calories higher.

Actually, my maintenance based on my YTD tracking of calories and weight change seems to be even higher than +130 above calculators estimates, since I can lose weight at +600 over MFP's maintenance estimate (before adding in workout calories, but no way are those averaging 600+ daily, it's probably more like 300-400 daily).

Yeah, similar - I maintain around 500 or so calories above MFP's estimate, which is 25-30% above MFP's estimate for my sex/age/size.

I believe the "calories at rest" estimates from researchers. Multiple pounds of extra muscle does matter, but it takes a long time to get there . . . very, very long time when in a calorie deficit. I rough-estimate I may have as much as 13 pounds more muscle mass than the average for my demographic, back-estimating it from estimated BMI/BF% correlations. That would mean something like 50 or so at-rest calories daily, maybe?

"Weight train to add muscle to speed weight loss" is pretty much a non-starter idea, when it comes to meaningful weight loss by a person relatively newly doing that exercise, IMO . . . but it is just my opinion. Long term, it may help, sure. (And inclination toward movement really matters. That's facilitated by fitness.)

Strength training is 100% worth doing, though, for a variety of reasons (even though I under-do it myself, these days).