It has been shown, in a recently conducted study, that strength training is just as effective as aerobics or cardio workouts at lowering body fat. A lot of individuals think that if you are keep on losing weight you need to go out and run.
However, the study found that that even when strength training is done on its own, it still causes a favourable loss of body fat without having to diet consciously or go running. The study found that you are able to lose around 1.4% of your entire body fat through strength training alone, which is similar to how much we might lose through cardio or aerobics.
Why Cardio Exercise Aids In Fat Loss
Minute-for-minute, cardiovascular exercise (or aerobic exercise) burns more calories than weight training owing to the continuous nature of intensity. Owing to this, doing cardio for weight loss can assist you with losing body fat.
However, the kind of cardio which you choose is very important – depending on what your ultimate goal is:
- LISS (which stands for ‘low-intensity steady-state’ cardio) is best for those with large weight loss goals. This type of cardi is great for beginners and assist with chipping away at stubborn body fat
- HIIT (which stands for ‘high-intensity interval training’) is best for retaining existing muscle, stimulating fat-burning enzymes as well as burning fat as efficiently as possible
How Important Is Cardiovascular Exercise For Fat Loss?
Research actually found that those who select aerobic exercise lost up to four times more fat as opposed to those who only chose to strength train. However, and this is important, your healthy body goals may not just be about fat loss – maintaining muscle tissue is very important for a healthy metabolism and sculpted physique. That’s where resistance training comes in.
Resistance Training Helps You Burn More Calories Every Day
Although a resistance-training workout doesn’t usually burn as many calories as a cardio workout, it has other important benefits. For instance, resistance raining is more effective than cardio at building muscle. Muscle burns more calories at rest as opposed to some other tissues, including fat.
Owing to this, it is commonly said that developing muscle is the key to boosting your resting metabolism — in other words, how many calories you burn when you are at rest.
One study assessed participants’ resting metabolisms throughout the 24 weeks of resistance training. In men, resistance training led to a 9% increase in resting metabolism. The results in women were smaller, with an increase of almost 4%.
While this might sound good, it’s important to think about how many calories this represents. For the men, resting metabolism increased by about 140 calories per day. In women, it was only about 50 calories per day. Thus, resistance training and building a little bit of muscle won’t make your metabolism skyrocket, however it may increase it by a small amount.
Resistance Training Has Other Important Calorie-Burning Benefits
In particular, research has shown that you burn more calories in the hours after a weight training session as compared to a cardio workout. In fact, there are reports of resting metabolism remaining elevated for up to 38 hours after resistance 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. For most kinds of exercise, a more intense workout will increase the number of calories you burn afterwards.
Contact Trifocus Fitness Academy
If you’re eager to discover more about strength training then you need to do our Personal Training Diploma. Follow this link to learn more and to register.
