Cardio VS Lifting

Compared to cardio how many calories are burned from lifting weights? If I don’t want to bulk up but want to loose fat and tone my muscles should I do a lot more cardio or do an equal amount but just lift lightly?

What’s that? Somebody asked about weights vs. cardio? Trot out banthafodder for the “everyone must lift heavy” lecture …

You might be surprised at the results you’ll get from sticking with a progressive strength training program. It doesn’t take much cardio (if any) to be healthy if you’re lifting as heavy as you can, on a linear progression (meaning, every time you work out, you lift more on a given exercise than the last time). You can get really really strong with zero fear of bulking up, because you won’t be taking steroids, and that’s what it takes to make a woman big.

Muscles don’t “tone”; there is only stronger vs. weaker and bigger vs. smaller. Lifting light is really just cardio; it doesn’t make you stronger at all. The “burn” people talk about is really just lactic acid accumulating in your muscles. That’s not actually doing anything for fitness; all it does is, well, burn. If you have low body fat, you’ll need some added muscle to take its place, but again, beyond the little bit that heavy weight training will put on at first, what’ll happen if you follow a progressive program is that you’ll just get … well, Really Really Ridiculously Good-Looking.

I got this book for my wife; it explains the power of heavy weight training for women better than I could hope to do in a single post.

Some examples: First, there’s my favorite one from the book above

From Google image searches:

• http://www.crossfitglenmore.com/.a/6a00e553ff5b…
• http://www.crossfiteastside.com/uploaded_images…
• http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2584/3664448420_…
  http://www.ttowf.com/greeceinactionimages/greec…
• http://i1.ce.cn/english/subject/beijing08/video…
• http://wvpowerlifting.com/Historical_Images/pl1…

Some of these are lifting at the super-elite level, and they’re definitely not physically huge. Even if they’re bigger than you want to be, just … don’t get good enough to lift at the Olympics :-)

Anyway, those are my thoughts, from some random Internet guy. Do hard strength training first and keep that the focus of your program. Eat healthy food. Do fun cardio because it’s fun, fitting it in after the other stuff.

From what I’ve read, you should do both.

Both have their individual benefits and should be part of a weight-loss routine. Cardio burns more calories than weight training but both burn significant amounts.

If you just did cardio while cutting back on calories, you will lose muscle as well as fat. Therefore weight training helps to reduce or prevent this. Muscle also burns more calories, even at rest 24 hours a day, but there is debate about just how significant this is.

Both are better than just the other. If you are about average in size an shape, you will see a lot difference from lifting weights, not by turning into Hulk but just by looking more athletic.
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No matter what the weightlifting zealots say, cardio is indispensable and healthy.
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Research has shown that doing both cario and weightlifting will lower your BF% faster than doing just one of the two. So do both. But focus on you weakness. If you feel like you are fragile and weak, then focus more on strength traininig (preferably free weights), if you feel like you are about to have a cardiac arrest when you go on the treadmill, then you should put focus on that. Work on your weakest link to become stronger individual overall.
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“Train your weakest link and race your strongest.” ~ Some old athletic maxim.

(OK, sorry for the consistently long replies; this is a topic very near to me, so I get enthusiastic…)

Good points. I didn’t mean to come across as saying cardio is useless; what I meant was that strength training with free weights will probably result in more noticeable benefit at first than cardio. In other words, increasing your overall strength will affect your quality of life more than the loss of fat you’d experience if you’d done cardio in the place of the strength training that caused the increase. Therefore, it’s smart to base your workout schedule around strength, then fill in any gaps with high intensity cardio.

Check out this article, from the author of Starting Strength. He’s owned a black iron gym for like 20 or 30 years and has lots of experience training people. Here’s what he says about trying to keep people interested enough to keep coming to his gym (and paying him :-) ):

As a practical matter, I figured out a long time ago that the easiest way to make the human body look different in the shortest period of time possible was to make it stronger, and that the easiest way to guarantee that this happened was to add weight to the bar every time the member shows up. I would teach them the basic barbell exercises in the first workout, because I found that they worked faster.

Weights vs. cardio isn’t really an either/or thing, necessarily. Heavy weight work is a form of cardio; you’ll raise your VO2Max doing either. Personally, after a heavy set of squats or deadlifts, my heart rate can stay north of 160-170 for a minute or two while my body catches up to the exertion. The key is to keep the weights heavy enough for this to happen.

It’s really hard, exhausting work, but it makes everything else in life easier. I wish I’d started strength training sooner in life. I feel much better than I did when I was younger and did nothing but HIIT running and stationary bike work all the time.

So, that’s just my experience. I really think that most people who short-change the free weights (not Cieron or arnthoria; I just mean in general) haven’t actually done a linear progression on the basic compound barbell lifts. There’s a vast difference between that and trying to do bodybuilding-style workouts, or just aimlessly doing whatever lifts look fun. If all I ever did was the latter, I’d probably have dropped weight training a long time ago.

The worst you can do is, what, not do any cardio for a month while you throw everything you’ve got into weight training. What’s a month in the Big Scheme of Things?

OK, that’s my plug.

You need to do both. As many have said it’s not an either/or situation. As a female you won’t “bulk up”, you lack the hormones naturally to do so. As banthafodder said, “tone” isn’t really an option. You get stronger with more muscle or you can have weaker muscles and less of them. More muscle mass is better because muscle mass is what helps our metabolism burn more efficiently. We naturally lose muscle mass as we age, so if we don’t work to preserve or add to what we have, we gain weight while eating and doing the same things. i actually wrote a blog post about women and weightlifting a couple of weeks ago. Feel free to check it out.
Pamela

www.ThrivePersonalFitness.com

Adana,
as PamelaH said, you have to do both. It is really hard to know which one will burn more calories because it depends on the intensity you approach each one with. If you spend an hour walking on the treadmill at 4.0mph you wont burn nearly as many calories as an intense weight session. The same thing can apply for an intense cardio session but not intense weight training.

You don’t have to worry about getting bulky unless you are lifting heavy weights for a lot of volume (sets & reps). You have to remember that women have a completely different hormonal response to weight training than guys do. Most guys spend their whole life trying to get bigger and are still pretty small and we have a better chance from a hormonal standpoint of gaining muscle mass.

If you are trying to lose weight and harden your muscles but not have them grow, try doing some interval circuits. This will involve doing an intense spurt of cardio (:30-:60) and then going straight into 2-4 exercises. I prefer to do an upper body exercise, lower body exercise than either core or another upper body exercise. Take a maximum of :90 rest and repeat the cycle up to 4 times.

Dont even worry about lifting “light”. The more you challenge your muscles the more calories you will burn. Challenge yourself with a weight and do 8-15 reps. Anything more than 15 is probably too much.

Let me know if you need any more help. I’d be glad to help you put together a workout.

Adana,
as PamelaH said, you have to do both. It is really hard to know which one will burn more calories because it depends on the intensity you approach each one with. If you spend an hour walking on the treadmill at 4.0mph you wont burn nearly as many calories as an intense weight session. The same thing can apply for an intense cardio session but not intense weight training.

You don’t have to worry about getting bulky unless you are lifting heavy weights for a lot of volume (sets & reps). You have to remember that women have a completely different hormonal response to weight training than guys do. Most guys spend their whole life trying to get bigger and are still pretty small and we have a better chance from a hormonal standpoint of gaining muscle mass.

If you are trying to lose weight and harden your muscles but not have them grow, try doing some interval circuits. This will involve doing an intense spurt of cardio (:30-:60) and then going straight into 2-4 exercises. I prefer to do an upper body exercise, lower body exercise than either core or another upper body exercise. Take a maximum of :90 rest and repeat the cycle up to 4 times.

Dont even worry about lifting “light”. The more you challenge your muscles the more calories you will burn. Challenge yourself with a weight and do 8-15 reps. Anything more than 15 is probably too much.

Let me know if you need any more help. I’d be glad to help you put together a workout.

In the class that I am taking I was taught that both are efficient for a good and thorough weight loss and work out. Cardio will get your heart rate going so where you can lose calories and lifting helps burn the fat that is building on your muscles!

Cardio will burn far more calories. But, it’s easier to simply eat less calories than it is to burn them off. One hour of cardio could be negated with a single muffin!

Weight training will help you to maintain, or even gain muscle. But, as a woman it’s difficult to add muscle mass. So, fears of bulking up aren’t too realistic. Don’t worry about lifting too heavy…it can’t be done.

As a women the main reason to lift weights is to keep your muscle mass, and to keep Osteoperosis at bay! This is why doing arm curls with 5lb. dumbbells is useless. Train just like the big guys in the gym. Do squats, deadlifts, rows, and pushups. You won’t get bulky without chemical enhancement.

For weight loss…..it’s all diet!

Women don’t get bulky from lifting unless they dedicate their lives to that goal (ie. in the gym almost every day, eating massive amounts of protein) and even then you might not succeed, depending on genetics.

Cardio and lifting burn close to the same amount of calories, but it really is important to do BOTH, especially if you would like to not only lose weight, but keep it off forever.

If you don’t do any lifting while losing weight, you will lose muscle mass and your metabolism will slow with the loss of muscle, meaning that you will have to eat less and less just to keep the same amount of weight off. Lifting while losing weight will help to maintain the muscle you already have while you lose weight.

It is very, very difficult to actually gain muscle mass while losing weight. Unless you are very well researched, you probably won’t be able to do this, so again this is another point against worries of bulking up.

The most important point to doing both cardio and lifting, is that cardio will improve the health of your heart and increase your chances against heart disease. Weight lifting will increase your chances against osteoperosis and arthritis, which aren’t fun either.

Ditto what everyone else said. You need to do weight training if you want to look good. I absolutely think that Rachel Cosgrove’s book, The Female Body Breakthrough, would be great reading for you.

Just as a reference, I do primarily weight lifting (with heavy weights) and very little “cardio.” I exercise 4x a week for about 1hr each session. Feel free to look at my pictures and see if you think I look too bulky. My profile is public.

http://www.lookinggoodmom.com

First,let’s get on the same page, cardio is defined as 50-60% of the max HR. Think of an easy jog, ride, row, maybe even brisk power walk. An intensity level that allows you to speak normally.

With cardio defined that way how can you all say that cardio will burn more calories than strength training? I think this misconception comes from looking at “bodybuilding” routines as the golden role for “weight training”, where a lot of time is spent resting. But if you compare working minute for working minute, weight training wins hands down. Perhaps is not a misconception, but regurgitation…how many have actually worn an HRM and compared the differences.

Don’t get me wrong cardio is a good tool for fat loss and cardiovascular fitness and like most say you should do both to have a completely rounded fitness resume. But cardio simply cannot beat moderate to high intensity resistance training for burning calories.

I am not talking about mindless, cookie-cutter bodybuilding routines of set, rest, set, rest, repeat for 45 mind-numbing minutes. I’m talking about heavy compound lifts or explosive olympic/plyometric/acrobatic(bodyweight) type workouts.

Strap on your heart rate monitor and do some of the crossfit strength workouts, you can complete many of these in 15-20 minutes and burn 500-800 calories easily. Then compare that to hoping on a bike and ride for the same duration – good luck with burning 500-800 calories on a bike in 15-20 minutes. 30 minutes at an average of 145HR (higher than cardio!) yields me around 500-600 calories and I weigh 205.

Or even compare squats, deadlifts, powercleans calorie burn to cardio of the same duration.

Your body will burn more calories by doing an intense resistance workout and continue to burn those calories for a long time after you’ve stopped. Cardio, simply doesn’t have the same impact on stimulating fat loss and muscular adaptation as high intensity resistance workouts.

I have burned 500 cals in around 12 minutes doing GI Jane for example and within an hour of that workout my body burned another 480 calories.

Cardio has it’s place, but it’s not king for burning calories. Check your heart rate monitor the next time and come post your results.

@hunrugger. I have 2 things to say.

The first is your comparison of heavy weights and light cardio is wrong. If you are going to make comparisons at least make sure they are relevant. You should only be comparing heavy weights with its equal counterpart – in other words heavy cardio. I wouldn’t call 50 – 60% max hr difficult. When I walk normally down the street my hr is about 95 which is about 50% my max. To compare normal walking with heavy weights is silly. If you do proper hard cardio at a min hr of 165 you will see cardio is far superior at burning cals than weights.

Also you mentioned 145hr is higher than cardio. I don’t know many people who do cardio would think 145hr is hard. For me calling a 145hr session ‘cardio’ would be humiliating.

The second thing I want to say is your figures of 500 cals in 12 minutes seem a bit far fetched. I don’t think it’s possible to get those numbers. All your figures seem a bit inflated.

Kesa, thanks for the feedback, but you do the workouts with an HRM on and compare. You obviously are not familiar with the practical (real-world) application of many of the Crossfit workouts, 500 cals is achievable …heck, just try doing 100 moderately heavy deadlifts with as little rest as possible – check what you burn, it will amaze you!

My comparison is not meant be direct – infact that is my very point – INTESITY. Weight training is generally a more intense workout, whereas cardio by it;s real world definition is not.

You can work hard OR long – hard is more EFFICIENT. Efficiency being the key here.

Again, I say strap on the HRM and compare for yourself.

Finally, the hormonal response is not even remotely comparable – this hormonal response is another factor that makes resistance training superior to cardio for burning calories.

Here are a few things to look into if burning calories efficiently is the desire…
tabata, hiit, crossfit

Whoa! Whoa! We’re dealing with Crossfitter….. The rest of us normal humans should just step away before we get told the what ’fer!

hunrugger you’re talking to a number of people who have worn a HRM while lifting and doing cardio. But, thank you for assuming that we haven’t. Of course, we’re not doing “fran” so clearly our form of training is inferior.

Sorry if I’m coming across as harsh, but it is in response to the “superior” tone of your original post in this thread.

Look, heavy cardio is going to beat heavy lifting everytime when it comes to calorie burn. And I’m not a cardio person. But, it’s just fact. I’m sure that you can get some crazy calorie burn with crossfit workouts. But, if that same level of effort was applied to running out on the road you’d burn more calories.

The question for me is, “why do I care how many calories I’m burning?” I don’t. It’s easier for me to simply eat less, or eat more. Diet is how I control my weight. So, I could care less about calorie burn. But, if for some reason I did….I’d run.

I totally agree with you about the hormonal differences. This is where I see weight lifting as being superior. It’s not because it burns more calories, but because it makes for better strength, efficiency, skill, body composition, etc. And it creates a better hormonal effect on the body overall. Doing tons and tons of cardio without strength training just wears your body down. It’s a rare person who can just run for years and years without strength training….or tons of injuries.

Too funny chad, make a note – you should crank up your condescension if you want to get under my skin though. You probably mistook me for a cult member of CrossFit. I believe in the general methodology and after doing it for a few years now (on my own, never at a CF facility and starting before it was ‘the cool thing’) I look back at more than 15 years of BBing routines and mindless cardio and realize what a huge mistake it all was. Mistake is a bit strong, I did I make great gains, yes, but there were heaps of wasted hours in the gym and even at 245 and 10% BF I was very far from fit.

I’m not here to argue, but I not here to ‘just get along’ either. I am here to provide what feedback and knowledge I have from years of both research and more importantly practical experience. Challenging each other and opening up more discussion is the best thing for these forums.

Please don’t mistake me for a Crossfit CULT member. Do I believe Crossfit is an incredible methodology? Absolutely. Do I believe it to be the holy grail? Absolutely not. Is it the only tool in my box? absolutely not. I don’t follow the daily WODs, I don’t adhere to a paleo diet (far from it), I think the $$$ CF wants is ridiculous as well. What I love about CF is the practical application of it all – example, my sons kicked a ball over the fence – six foot, no gate, what did I do, with a quick muscle up I vaulted over the fence will little effort and my knees were not in pain from landing, not many 215lb 36 yo(at the time) BBers can pull that off no matter what their squating, benching or deadlifting. I really don’t mean to focus on CF.

I’m glad you brought up my first post, read it again – as I stated – let’s get on the same page with what cardio IS (and by inference what it’s not), by definition is not intense weight training, generally speaking is, thus it’s more efficient at burning calories.

As for my tone, you should read again.

Almost forgot – something we agree on:
The question for me is, “why do I care how many calories I’m burning?” I don’t. It’s easier for me to simply eat less, or eat more. Diet is how I control my weight. So, I could care less about calorie burn. But, if for some reason I did….I’d run.

@hunrugger
It is always great to see people here that are passionate about partaking in discussions, and I think you will be a boon for this forum. But lets just say this is not the first discussion on cardio vs weightlifting and calorie burn.
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It is firstly important start by fair comparisons. If you define cardio at 50-60 maxHR, then you should just call it walking. So then your comparison would be walking vs weightlifting. Its not a good comparison, an apples and oranges type of thing.
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By using a HR monitor you can easily confirm that there is a roof that weight training hits, that cardio will pass, when it comes to average HR. And thus cardio has the potential to burn more calories than weightlifting has.
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Then there is the matter of using CF in the place of weightlifting, when comparing cardio and weightlifting. CF is not what most people would define as weightlifting. You do use weights, and you lift them, but the reps are so high that you might define some workouts with weights as cardio with weights. By raising the reps the the limiters tend to be lactic acid buildup in the local muscles and cardiovascular fitness, or more specifically anaerobic fitness/muscular endurance. So the limiter is not strength as such. Strength plays a role, but you can see a skinny fit guy using the same weight as a less fit big/strong guy, in CF or kettlebell type of workouts. Over time, the skinny guy will be come bigger, and the big guy will be come leaner, so both gravitate towards some middle ground. But this is not what one should call weight training, in the traditional sense. And looking at the energy systems used you would see why.
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CF and kettlebell workouts, will utilize similar energy systems as a middle distance runner would.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_distance_tr…
In short, they need to tolerate lactic acid up to their eyeballs. And have very fit musculature in the muscles utilized. And NB you will get bigger muscles doing middle distance running, and you will also benefit more from doing weight lifting than say a marathon runner would (even though both benefit).
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The message is that training is complex, and over simplifying it to either cardio or weight lifting, is just not accurate. In reality, there are many flavors to both, and some things are a mix of both. Think of your goal as a mountain top. The shape of the mountain will lend some paths to be more optimal than others, up that particular mountain. The paths might even form a network of paths that cross frequently. The might even be a path that spirals up the mountain. – And still some folks would say that one should go up on the north side, while others say the mountain should be ascended from the south. Both would be kind of right. You could ascend strictly from the north or the south. But in reality the optimum pathway would wind up the mountain irrespective of north and south approaches.
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So speaking of cardio vs weight training is just oversimplifying training, as in north vs south approach, and thus not particularly useful in finding an optimal path to ones training goal. That path will be a multifaceted approach, almost certainly.
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PS welcome to DailyBurn’s forums. ;)

If your HR monitor says you are burning 500 calories in anything less than 30 minutes it’s just way off and flat wrong. Maybe if you weigh 300 lbs. At 200 lbs I can only get 500 calories in 5k – under 30 minutes – if I am running at 80% of my tested max HR and at the top of my zone 1.

Also you guys need to realize that the HR monitors are not accurate for most people and way off for many. A buddy I run with and I have both been tested at a lab and we know what our real max and 80% are, and how many calories we actually burn running. At both 200 lbs, we burn about the same # of calories (100/ kilometer) and run at roughly the same speed to do it. Our zone 1 endurance pace is very similar, right around 5:45 mins/Kilometer. For me at that speed and output level, my HR is 160. His is 145. A general HR monitor would tell us we burned completely different calories and they would both be wrong. His is quite a bit further off from mine, but in both cases the HR monitor will over-estimate the # of calories burned.

Just be careful, a HR monitor is not a very good estimate of calories burned, so if you are struggling with weight loss and you are not sure why, make sure you are not over-estimating calories burned with an HRM.

So I think the takeaway here is, your body has an incredible ability to adapt to what you’re requiring it to do. Nourish it well, and work flippin’ hard to force it to adapt to really hard work. You won’t get fit by doing easy steady state work, and to simplify the matter into a count of calories burned is to miss the point.

Clearly, however, there’s much disagreement on the optimal way to accomplish the flippin’ hard work. But we love it. :-)

arnthorla – thanks for the welcome.

500 calories cannot be burned in less than 30 minutes – ludacris.

adana – mix it up, train hard and reap the benefits!

Well it can be if you cover more distance… but I just find it unlikely that lifting would burn that much for most people. It would have to be insane weight non-stop to hit that.

But for a 200 lb person – 500 calories is about 5K at a 2% grade on a treadmill.

@ Lephturn

I disagree with you on your opinion of heart rate monitors. Today I went to the gym and did 30 minutes of hard cardio on the treadmill. My HMR told me afterwards that my average hr was 175 and I maxed at 193 hr. It also told me I burnt 612 cals. Using this data I can have an indication of how effective my training is and can then increase or decrease as wanted. I think collecting data like this would be hard if I was forced to use my fingers and toes to count instead of using a watch. Sure HMR’s may not be 100% accurate but they are the best exertion measuring device available. I find them invaluable.

500 calories in less than 30 minutes is possible. But, I wouldn’t want to be the one to clean up the floor after you!

@Kesa

I’m not saying HRM information is useless, just that it is very inaccurate for most people. The measurement that a treadmill gives you based on speed, distance, and incline is going to be more accurate than an HRM, especially if you have never had a good lab test to see what your heart rate is for various levels of output.

Don’t get me wrong… I use an HRM when I run. It is not used to calculate calories burned, but only as a rough gauge of effort when I am missing more accurate measurements… like say running hills outside. On a treadmill, the device will tell you more accurately than any HRM how much you burn.

An HRM is still useful information, just be careful with it and realize that the calorie estimates from an HRM is only accurate for a very small portion of the population – I’ve been told (by the scientists doing my lactate threshold and VO2 Max tests) that it’s only accurate for less than 5% of the population. Even then, it can only do a decent estimate for consistent activity like running or biking, something like lifting is a poor exercise to estimate calories using an HRM. The Daily Burn numbers for calories burned when you put in lifting is far more conservative, and certainly a safer bet than an HRM. I just don’t want to see people struggle to lose weight because their HRM is over-estimating what they burn.

Take HRM calorie burn estimates with a grain of salt… personally I’m going to stick to Daily Burn’s estimates for lifting, they seem much more reasonable – and under-estimating calories burned is a lot better for me than over-estimating!