First and foremost you are not going to lose weight if you are eating more calories than what you burn with the planned fat loss activity – weights, weights plus cardio, or cardio alone.
That said, to most effectively lose weight you must do both – weight lifting and cardio exercise. Here is why:
If you only do cardio without weights you burn fat, but there is nothing to protect your muscles in this game. You don’t use them, the body gets rid of some of them – it uses them for energy to supply your body with additional calories when needed. You slow down your metabolism so much, you spiral down and ulitmately you plateau.
From this point on you need to do one of the following three things: increase the cardio duration, further decrease the calories, or both simultaneously. Your metabolism slows down again, due to the fact that you contunue losing muscle tissue along with the fat… And if you remember muscles are the burner that uses fat for energy, so less muscles, less fat burnt and less calories needed to sustain your daily activities and cardio, too.
So, clearly doing only cardio for fat loss is not the answer!
Let’s examine the case where you lift weights only. In this case you generally use less calories (if your workout is not crazy long) compared to a good cardio session. Some of these calories come from fat, some from carbohyrdates. Not enough calories are burned to provide for a good fat loss process.
So, lifting weights is effective at burning fat, but the process is very slow. It could be somewhat axelerated if you make your weight sessions resample cardio or high intensity intervals cardio. But again, you will need more calories burned.
Finally, weights and cardio together. By lifting weights not only do you burn calories and provide calorie deficit toward your fat loss goal, but you also send a message to your body that you need the muscles as big as they are. And if you can recall, each pound of muscle burns about 30 Calories a day, just like this resting and doing nothing.
So, the answer is both – weights and cardio. The weights will maintain your muscles, thus maintaining the total size of tissue that burns fat, and the cardio will make this tissue use a lot of fat during a short period of time. Now, if you choose to do high intensity intervals (HIIT) instead of steady cardio you will ultimately end up burning more calories. HIIT elevates your calorie expenditure for hours after you’re done with the exercise.
My presonal choice – heavy, but short weight lifting sessions and HIIT cardio that is twice as short as a normal steady cario session… all this in combination with a well-crafted meal plan, ensuring that I’m very slightly calorie deficient. There!
If you don’t know how to calculate your calories and put together your meals, and even if you need suggestions for fat loss and muscle building routines to go along with your perfect meal plan simply use my FitNA tool – it does all this for you… and a lot more… and it’s totally FREE! Just go to http://www.ivannikolov.com/membersite and create a free account if you don’t already have one.
Ivan Nikolov is a former Top 5 Natural Bodybuilder, entrepreneur and health enthusiast. Ivan is an engineer by education, but his real passions are the human metabolism and how it is influenced by the environment. Most specifically, Ivan studies how nutritional stimuli affect our health in a positive and negative way. Ivan is also a fan of pushing the boundaries of the physical abilities of his body. He likes to perform exercises and training routines that have real application in day-to-day life. The emphasis is on core strength, coordination and the ability to handle his own body weight with ease. Lastly, Ivan is hungry for success and furthering of his personal development. He has had his own specialty healthy bakery for three years. He currently bolgs on health topics, attends Toastmasters Intl. public speaking meetings, reads a lot, develops functional foods recipes. Another area of development for Ivan is training his brain in critical thinking and reasoning.
