Lifting vs Running

👉🏼Lifting for an hour, burning 150 calories, is better than hill running for an hour, burning 800.

Judging a training session’s effectiveness by the number of calories it burns is the wrong way to view exercise if you want to improve your physique

If the calorie burn of an exercise was a good indicator of fat loss success, then everyone should run on an incline treadmill for an hour every day. Running up a hill is, by far, the quickest way to burn a maximal number of calories in a short period of time 🏃🏻‍♂️

This shouldn’t be your approach in changing your physique…

Let’s say you are  able to run for one hour straight 3 times/week – which I’d argue less than 20 percent of the population can do without pain – that’s difficult. Let’s call it 700 calories for that hour. Done three times a week, that totals out to 2100 calories burned that week from your exercise sessions.

“Manually” burning these calories through three hours of cardio is hard work, and that 2100 calorie deficit you’ve created through added activity is easily wiped out by eating excessively at one meal out with friends.

Instead of dictating an exercise’s effectiveness by how many calories it burns per hour (which cardio wins by a landslide compared to resistance training), shift your metric to what activities will burn calories automatically, when not training (what building muscle mass does).

Call an hour of resistance training 150 calories. At first glance, it looks like a weak counterpart to cardio for effective fat loss. The muscular adaptations it drives, however, increases the number of calories you burn throughout the day while doing nothing. Just existing. That is the magic of resistance training.

Frustratingly, if you go online, you’ll see for every pound of muscle gained, your body burns a mere 50 additional calories each day. I don’t like this message.

While lab petri dish studies do show this slight metabolism increase as the case, they don’t consider the cascading benefits resistance training has on improving body composition:

1️⃣Improvements in hormonal profiles (increased growth hormone, testosterone, and other favorable movements in sex hormone levels, put simply)
2️⃣Decreases in hunger
3️⃣Improved insulin sensitivity
4️⃣Elevated post-training mood resulting in greater activity in the rest of the day (a real thing)
5️⃣Stimulates body to BUILD muscle and soft tissue, rather than being stuck in repair and store mode from cardio.

Pair this 2-3x/week lifting habit with increasing your daily step count through conscious choices to walk (after meals, parking far away, stairs, etc.). You’ll see more progress than you ever have if you do this for 2 months.