Cardio vs. Weightlifting: Improve Your Metabolism

The biggest question: What kind of exercise improves weight loss?

Technically, cardio and weights both improve your weight loss. It just depends on a persons’ opinion, experience and body goal. There will be many articles, trainers and athletic opinions that may or may not show results in your body. Therefore it depends on your body, your goal and your state of mind.

With cardio:

There have been many suggestions from people to use cardio as a beginning step to losing weight. You help train your body by increasing your heart rate and increase your intensity. The best part is, the only weight that you carry with this, is your own. There are studies that show cardio can help more than weight loss for example — a study had 119 participants on the same diet but a group performing aerobic exercises and the another with weight lifting exercises. The group who did aerobic exercises lost 1 1/2 more pounds than those who were weight lifting. Those who participated in the weight lifting exercises even stayed 45 minutes longer than those who did aerobic. Though, this does not mean that weight lifting cannot help with weight loss.

With weights:

You can use free weights or machines. The purpose of weights is to provide an add-on weight on your body for it to burn more calories. You’re tricking your body that you have extra fat to you want to burn. In result to this, not only do you lose fat but also gain muscle. Keep in mind that muscle does weight more than fat. Therefore, that scale might be the same, or it wouldn’t show any drastic changes. Another benefit when you are working on weight training is that you boost your metabolism. And that is a huge part into losing that belly fat. The weights will help reshape your body to look leaner and stronger. If that’s what you want it’s best to give weight training a try.

Keep in mind the rule of thumb is to a little bit of both. The only difference is that one exercise is using your own body weight while the other is just adding on. You would always want to start with your body weight and build-up.  When you build-up, your training your body to boost your metabolism and also your calorie intake. The more active you are the more calories you should consume in order to keep up with the energy. Though, if you change your pace so will the process.