Cardio or weights?

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/04/2021 (1658 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Every week I get emails from readers, and the same few questions tend to pop up more often than not.

Among these questions is “what’s better: cardio or weights?”

It’s probably too general of a question, as both have their place from a general health perspective.

But knowing enough about what people’s true motivations are, these folks are usually trying to figure out which one burns more fat.

But that’s not how the body works. While exercise is a magic pill in a lot of ways and you certainly should be exercising (more on this later), using it solely as a magic eraser to burn calories is not going to be amazingly effective.

Allow me to explain. To lose a pound of body fat in a week, you need to create a 500 calorie deficit each day under what your body needs to maintain its weight. This is based on the 3,500 calorie rule that states a pound of fat contains 3,500 calories. It’s a bit simplistic and we can safely assume it isn’t perfect for everyone, but for the sake of this example, it will do the job.

You can create this deficit via exercise, via food or through a combo of the two.

The problem is, trying to burn 500 calories through exercise isn’t very efficient, despite what your FitBit tells you.

For instance, let’s use the general rule of 100 calories burned per mile, so you would have to run about five miles to burn 500 calories. Let’s assume you’re running a 10-minute mile, so you’d need to do a daily 50-minute run to reach that number. Every day. Rain or shine. This doesn’t account for the fact your body gets more efficient at running over time, and what once would burn 500 calories may only do half of that six months from now. Nor does it consider how your body can “down-regulate” calorie burn from day-to-day activities to account for the extra activity.

Weight training burns fewer calories than cardio, but it does help maintain and gain muscle, which is a critical factor I’ll get more into in a second. But I bet that “after” photo on your vision board will require weight training on some level.

Let’s roughly estimate you burn 250 calories an hour per lifting session, so you would need to weight train every single day at a very high intensity for two hours to accomplish that 500 calorie goal.

Are you willing to engage in very intense exercise every day? Probably not. Especially if you’re starting out and you’re not Michael Phelps — you know, with a life, kids, job and so on.

On the other hand, it’s far easier to cut a few hundred calories from your diet, especially if you’re just getting started.

You could swap your cream and sugar-filled latte for something slightly less calorie-intensive. Hey, drink it black if you’re into that. You’ll probably save yourself upwards of 250 calories right there. That sacrifice beats a 50-minute jog, surely?

Now, there’s just one problem with the “cut calories forever” approach. Exercise does have a role to play in other ways.

Ultimately, the goal of every fat-loss program should be to preserve muscle while also burning fat.

Rarely is one’s “goal” physique achieved by dieting alone. You need a few pounds of well-placed muscle thrown in, too (yes, ladies, this includes you!).

And while cardio has many benefits, it does more harm than good when it comes to holding onto that precious muscle when you’re dieting.

Bryner et al. put 20 people (17 women and three men) on an 800-calorie liquid diet (yikes!) and split them into two groups. One group paired the diet with cardio while the other group lifted weights.

After 12 weeks, both groups had comparable weight loss, but the cardio group lost nine pounds of lean muscle in the process. The weight training group managed to gain two pounds of muscle. Who do you think will look better in the end? And be better positioned to keep the weight off? Don’t answer that — it’s clearly the group that kept the muscle.

In 2015, Clark JE published a systematic review and meta-analysis (this is where they pull a huge sampling of studies) comparing the effectiveness of three treatments for weight loss: diet only, exercise only and a combination of diet and exercise.

The results showed that diet plus resistance training or a combination of resistance training and cardio with diet had a greater effect on improving one’s body than diet alone or diet plus cardio.

Without weight training, the body doesn’t have a reason to preserve muscle mass. So you may end up losing 20 pounds on the scale but not looking a whole lot different than you started (the skinny-fat affliction!).

How do you maintain your results?

Losing fat is only a small part of everyone’s goal. The ultimate goal is to lose fat and keep it off for good but most fitness programs don’t account for this necessary transition phase.

Studies show as many as 80 per cent who lose weight gain it back. Where most go horribly wrong in the diet world is getting to the end of the “diet” and saying “hey, I lost the weight” and they stop doing all the good things that helped them reach said goal.

At the end of a diet, you can approach weight maintenance in two ways: by keeping calories and activity low forever or by slowly adding in more calories while increasing activity to match.

The latter is the essence of the maintenance approach we use with clients because the sooner we can add food back in, the better. This also presents an opportunity to fine-tune and shape the body, giving it the quality calories it needs to tone up those trouble spots.

It’s not like the weight-loss phase where you’ll be motivated by the scale and mirror. Maintenance is a whole different animal. It will test your willpower, it will test your “why,” and for some it will feel like you’re going backwards. This requires a bit of trial and error to do right.

But it’s not uncommon to get to a place where you eat more than you ever thought you could while maintaining your current level of leanness. That’s the promised land.

Maintenance helps you stabilize your new weight, form lifelong habits and slowly but surely change your identity for good so there’s no going back to the old you who had the weight challenges in the first place. That’s the secret to permanent weight loss.

Mitch Calvert is a Winnipeg-based fitness coach for men and women like his former self. Heavyset in his 20s, he lost 60 pounds and now helps clients find their spark and lose the weight for life. Visit mitchcalvert.com to grab yourself a free metabolism jumpstart or inquire about his next “2 Pant Size Promise” coaching program (yes, you get that result or pay nothing).