Bowde Blog | Which is better cardio or lifting weights for weight loss?

The two most popular workout regimes are cardio exercises and lifting weights.

When trying to lose weight many people find themselves asking the question should they do cardio exercises or lift weights?

Research on how many calories people burn during various activities have been done and the consensus is that you tend to burn more calories when doing cardio than in weight training for about the same amount of effort.

Although a weight training workout doesn’t typically burn as many calories as a cardio workout, it has other important benefits, for example, weight training is more effective than cardio at building muscle, and muscle burns more calories at rest than some other tissues, including fat

Because of this, it is commonly said that building muscle is the key to increasing your resting metabolism which in simpler terms is, how many calories you burn at rest.

Research has indicated that you burn more calories in the hours following a weight training session, compared to a cardio workout. In fact, there are reports of resting metabolism staying elevated for up to 40 hours after weight training, while no such increase has been reported with cardio.

This means that the calorie burning benefits of weights aren’t limited to when you are exercising. You may keep burning calories for hours or days afterward.

The trick here is to find a balance between these two popular workouts cardio and weight training such that you burn calories during training and at rest as well. The simplest and affordable weight lifting equipment one can use effectively is the dumbbell.