Does dieting and lifting weights make you lose weight faster than dieting and doing cardio?
PHOTO BY C1Photography
Here’s a thing, do you want to lose weight but you are
uncertain on how to start or do it? You may ind yourself
asking of what is the most effective thing to integrate with a
proper diet plan in order to lose weight faster -whether to
apply resistance training (lifting weights) OR cardiovascular
activities. Don’t worry, if you are confronted with this
dilemma, it’s normal. You are not the only one struggling
and trust me, most of us do. Weight loss wars have been a
long debate in the itness world and everyone has a story to
tell. It has been the battle ield between diet with weight
lifting and diet with cardio. Let’s make a quick run and lift
the pros and cons of these weight loss wars.
When you talk about wanting to lose weight, you would
probably mean that you want to lose the fats in your body
while retaining the muscles. Trust me, you don’t want to
lose lean muscle because it would slow your metabolism
and make you look less athletic. Maintaining your lean
muscle mass to lose fat and get lean should have been
inculcated in your mind before taking any training program.
Cardio is the fundamental thing you can do when it comes to
burning calories. If you burn more calories than you
consume in a day, you will lose weight. This is also known as
caloric de icit. Put on your running shoes, go for a hike, run
three miles or step on a treadmill and you will burn about
300 calories. It’s no doubt, cardio helps in improving your
heart health, training your heart to be in shape by
remaining at a higher level of operation while exercising.
However, because you are doing it for a consistent form of
exercise, you are not actually training you heart to prepare
for moments of extreme stress because it never really has to
indulge with rapid changes. Although, cardio workout helps
you lose weight, be it noted that you will lose both fat and
lean muscle mass. The good thing about cardio is that you
can do lots of it. Whether it’s walking, dancing, hiking,
running on a treadmill or ultimate frisbee. Nevertheless,
there is only a slight Exercise Post Oxygen Consumption
(EPOC) with cardio, which means that you only burn
calories when running, walking, hiking or dancing and
nothing much happens afterwards. Since you must burn
certain number of calories in order to lose one pound of
body fat, if you do enough of these cardio sessions, and
make sure you're not eating these calories back, weight loss
will result. Nonetheless, you are going to have to keep doing
those long cardio sessions. Time will likely become a big
factor with this one, as well as boredom could start to play a
role over time as well.
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