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Comment by dpark

3 years ago

Lifting weights is a poor way to burn calories. It’s a great way to build muscle and be healthier, but lifting weights is less efficient than aerobic exercise in terms of pure calorie burn.

e.g. Moderate intensity aerobic exercise burns 200-300 calories in 30 minutes. Moderate intensity weightlifting is 90-130 in the same time. You need vigorous weightlifting to get up to 250 in 30 minutes. Even taking into consideration post-exercise burn, weight lifting will at best get you too the same efficiency as aerobic exercise.

Example data from: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/323922#calculating...

Weightlifting is great but it’s not better for burning calories. It’s much better for retaining muscle while dieting, though.

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dpark

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dugite-code  3 years ago

I can't find the link but I remember reading an article about weight lifting raising the resting calorie use for quite some time after the exercise. Also as you say you retain more muscle, and that muscle requires calories at rest potentially altering the overall calculation. I still agree with the overall premise that fixing your diet is probably the most important aspect of weight loss though.

May main take-away was from the article it read that they focused on running as the primarily measured exercise. So it might not provide the best full picture when looking at other exercise methods.

  • dpark  3 years ago

    For sure, excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC) is a thing. It is real and measurable. But it’s not some crazy effect that offsets the fact that aerobic exercise is about 2x as calorie intensive as weight training during the actual exercise. As I recall the best way to drive up EPOC is to engage in high intensity interval training. HIIT has a much larger effect on EPOC than weight training (again, if I recall correctly).

    Calories burned from extra muscle are not as important as people like to imagine. It’s like cardio. Do enough and it has an effect, but in terms of what normal humans should expect, it’s not going to do much, because normal people are simply not going to build enough muscle to matter much. The average person isn’t going to build 40 extra pounds of lean mutant. Most of the claims about how many calories muscle will burn are also not backed up by any science so far as I can tell.

    I do agree that this article doesn’t cover a lot of stuff, though. I’m doubtful about the stuff claimed even about running because it feels so have wavey. The one potentially compelling study was on women who went from sedentary to running half marathons and the claim is that they “barely” burned more calories at the end than at the beginning, but “barely” is almost meaningless. Plus they did burn more so the whole thesis is in question.