Treadmill or Weight Lifting to lose weight

Many of us wonder If you want to lose weight, and keep it off what is the fastest possible way to do so. what’s the best strategy?

Is it hours on the treadmill, hours lifting weight or a combination of both. If you are one that wonders well this article can help you come to a better understanding.

CARDIO

First, cardio helps with improving your heart health, training your heart like a muscle to be in shape by remaining at a higher level of operation while exercising. However, because you’re doing a consistent form of exercise, you’re not really training to prepare for moments of extreme stress because it never really has to deal with rapid changes. The particular body part that you are working on needs constant contraction and stress to tear up the muscle fibers to rebuild lean strong muscles.

Cardio

Pros

Very high calorie burn during session (falls off shortly after)

Low barrier to entry, many different activities can be incorporated

Excellent low intensity options for fat loss i.e walking

Little need for rest in comparison to weight training

Cons

Most people will use running as default cardio, but over running is a common problem, resulting in injuries and strains

Difficult for very unfit people to get into, excepting at very low intensity

Moderate to intense sustained cardio is not ideal for hormone balance, especially for those with high cortisol levels (a sign of tiredness and/or stress)

Extremely difficult to create a balanced physique through cardio alone

WEIGHTLIFTING

Although a weight-training workout doesn't typically burn as many calories as a cardio workout, it has other important benefits

For example, weight training is more effective than cardio at building muscle, and muscle burns more calories at rest than some other tissues, including fat

Because of this, it is commonly said that building muscle is the key to increasing your resting metabolism — that is, how many calories you burn at rest.

One study measured participants’ resting metabolisms during 24 weeks of weight training.

In men, weight training led to a 9% increase in resting metabolism. The effects in women were smaller, with an increase of almost 4%

While this may 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, weight training and building a little bit of muscle won't make your metabolism skyrocket, but it may increase it by a small amount.

However, weight training also has other important calorie-burning benefits.

Specifically, research has shown that you burn more calories in the hours following a weight training session, compared to a cardio workout

In fact, there are reports of resting metabolism staying elevated for up to 38 hours after weight 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.

Weight Training

Pros

Increases muscle mass quickly

Causes a sustained spike in metablism, which means you burn calories long after the exercise is over

Low barrier to entry for the very unfit

Offers the ability to grow muscle and loss fat simultaneously

Cons

Higher barrier to recovery (e.g a four hour walk is great whereas a four hour weight session would be counter productive)

Lower caloric burn in comparison to cardio (minute by minute, not over time)

Lots of bad information on the market, leading to poor results

Can increase hunger significantly, so discipline with diet becomes a factor in success

Both. Light weights—light enough that you can do 15 to 20 reps before fatigue sets in—tend to activate slow-twitch muscle fibers. Heavy weights—so heavy that you can eke out only 8 to 10 reps—activate a higher percentage of fast-twitch ones. Combining the two lifting styles will give you the best results, says Brad Schoenfeld, Ph.D., an assistant professor in exercise science at CUNY Lehman College in Bronx, New York. Ideally, you'd do one light lifting day and one or two heavy days in a week, or mix it up in a single session.

For the biggest fitness gain/weight loss bang for your exercise buck, combine the two, doing your strength training first and finishing off with your cardio. An American Council on Exercise study on exercise sequencing found that your heart rate is higher—by about 12 beats per minute—during your cardio bout when you’ve lifted weights beforehand. That means more calories burned.