



Cardio vs Weight training for weight loss, This is creating confusion for people who want to lose weight. Well, let me figure out this difficult debate.

Cardio vs Weight training to lose weight.

If you're trying to burn fat why not do it in a way that has you working smarter rather than harder. Most people automatically assume that cardio is better for fat loss and weights are better for building muscle. And this may be true if you compare traditional steady-state cardio to traditional weight training but there are different forms of weight training that incorporate very effective new training techniques that may be far more beneficial for fat loss.







Now if you're looking for the quick overnight fix, I don't have that for you but this is as close as you're going to get to that magic bullet quick fix to spending less time in the gym while burning more fat from your workouts.

So let's start first by taking a closer look at Cardio and weight training at their core. Traditional cardio is usually performed on a treadmill, an elliptical stair climber and bike or even on a rowing machine. When I talk about traditional cardio I'm mostly referring to steady-state long duration cardio where you're continuously repeating the same low to moderate intensity motions like jogging, biking, or swimming for an extended period of time. Most of the traditional types of cardio are forms of aerobic training.





Aerobic training primarily involves using oxygen to sufficiently meet the body's energy demands during exercise. On the other hand traditional weight training where you lift a heavyweight load for a certain amount of reps before taking a break and then repeating for more sets, that is considered anaerobic training. With anaerobic training oxygen alone cannot supply enough energy to meet the demands placed on the body so glycogen from the muscles is primarily used to fuel the activity.





Generally speaking, you’ll burn more calories for each session of cardio than weight training for about the same amount of effort. Minute per minute, cardio burns more calories. But does that mean that cardio is better for fat loss? Let's take a closer look. For a long time, it was believed that to burn the maximum amount of fat you had to stay in what was known as the fat burning zone which mostly could only be maintained through aerobic cardiovascular activity. The idea behind the fat burning zone was that you would burn a higher percentage of fat calories rather than carbs calories when you stayed at about 70 percent of your maximum heart rate. And this made sense to most people because once an activity became too intense the pathway for energy would change to anaerobic and begin primarily burning glycogen or carbs for fuel rather than using fat oxidation.

However, it's been proven that the fat burning zone is a myth because both types of training aerobic and anaerobic can burn plenty of fat. so anything above roughly 70% of your maximum heart rate you might be burning a higher percentage of carbs, but you're also burning more overall calories because your heart rate is higher and the activity is more intense.

So even if you have a smaller percentage of fat coming from a larger overall number of calories, you can still wind up burning more fat.





This is easy to understand if I give you an example like, take 50 percent of a smaller number like 500, and then take 30 percent of a larger number like 1,000. Just because you're burning a higher percentage of fat from lower intensity exercise like steady state cardio, doesn't mean that you're burning more fat. On top of that even though we know cardio will typically burn more calories per session than weight training, research has shown that you burn more calories in the hours and sometimes days following a weight training session when compared to a cardio workout. Also, weight training will boost your metabolism for a long time.





Conclusion. Both cardio and weight training is good for weight loss. But if you mix both you will get the results faster and better. You should not be doing only cardio/weight if you want to have the best results do both. You should be doing the weight workouts first and after finishing it do the cardio. For example, do 30 minutes of weight training and then do 15 minutes of cardio that would be 45 minutes of exercise. So don't focus on only one thing.

I will suggest you hit the weights first (to use your glycogen more for weight training) and after finishing it do cardio.



