For decades now, there has been a big misconception in the general population about the best way to lose weight. Most people think cardio is the holy grail of melting off those unwanted pounds.
In reality, cardio is not that effective when it comes to weight loss and fat loss. Instead, if you want to burn the fat off your body, the fastest and healthiest way to do it is through some form of resistance training, such as weightlifting, fitness machines, resistance bands, medicine balls, and so on.
The First Problem With Cardio Exercises
The problem with using cardio as a fat burning method on its own simply doesn’t work well.
Let’s look at the math.
An average person might expect to burn about 300 calories from a brisk jog in an hour. However, what some fitness professionals don’t tell you about is how many calories your resting metabolic rate would consume anyway.
Even if you did nothing but lay in bed, you would burn about 120 calories. That means all that jogging really only burned about 180 calories. That’s about half a latte.
Most people after doing a cardio workout feel like they need to eat a little more, and more than compensate for their workout with their increased appetite.
The result? Cardio doesn’t do much at all for burning fat or losing weight.
The Second Problem With Cardio Exercises
Another common problem with cardio is that much of the gains athletes experience come not from an improved physique, but from more efficient muscle movements.
Once you get your body used to a certain movement, it can perform that movement much more efficiently.
A runner might think he or she is improving if they can jog for an hour instead of 30 minutes. But in reality, they’re not developing much muscle mass. Their bodies are just getting better at the movements needed in jogging.
If you put that same jogger on a bike, they won’t be much better than they would have been before starting their running program. Why? Their legs and body haven’t actually developed that much in capacity.
By the way, this is called sports specific training.
Why Resistance Training Burns More Fat Than Cardio
Resistance training burns fat. This seems counter-intuitive. After all, everyone is saying that to lose weight, you need to do cardio.
The reality is, the biggest burner of calories in your life is your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). You can expect to burn between 1600 to 1800 calories a day if you’re a man, 300 calories fewer if you’re a woman, just from your BMR.
Of course, there are many factors that affect your BMR, such as how strenuous your daily activities are, how long you perform them, how many calories you consume, how much water you drink, how much sleep you get, and so on.
What’s the best way to increase this number? Simply build more muscle. Increasing your body’s muscle mass by just 5 pounds will increase your BMR by about 400 to 600 kcal per day.
That’s a massive increase in calories burned. If you take your body fat percentage down and increase the amount of muscle mass in your body, you’ll naturally burn fat. This is how the human body functions.
The simple truth about fat loss and weight loss is this: build more lean muscle, and then let nature do the rest of the work.
In summary: You just discovered the truth about Resistance Training vs Cardio For Fat Loss.
Unfortunately, most of the population believes that cardio training is more effective than resistance training for losing weight…
But in reality, resistance training is far superior for weight loss than cardio.
Don’t fight this fact of human nature.