By: Chris Gates

Something we all consider when going about our fitness routines is how many calories we’re burning.

Your Apple Watch or Fitbit may give you a “calories burned” prediction. Most modern pieces of cardio equipment will also give an estimate on calorie expenditure.

As I’ve written before, these totals are inaccurate. They are predictions, at best. It’s just not realistic or feasible for the average person to expect to know exactly how many calories he or she burns in a training session, or throughout each day. We’d need specific equipment, technology, and knowledge to achieve that, and even at that there’d still be a small percentage of error.

All we can do is work hard and eat healthy. That combination is going to work for just about everybody when it comes to maintaining a healthy lifestyle and building the physique you want.

Now, working hard can come from multiple forms of fitness. Primarily, we can group our fitness into two categories: lifting (strength/resistance training) and cardio.

You might be curious about which forms of fitness burn the most calories. If so, you’re in luck. Recent research may point us in the right direction.

A recent study aimed to predict energy expenditure of a single resistance training session in men and women, which was later reviewed in MASS. This study had participants perform the following exercises:

• Leg Press
• Chest Press
• Leg Curl
• Pull Down
• Knee Extension
• Triceps Push Down
• Bicep Curls

Participants performed each exercise for 2-3 sets to failure, and researchers aimed to estimate “excess calorie expenditure.” This means they were looking to estimate the energy expenditure (calories burned) specific to the exercises performed. As Greg Nuckols in MASS explains it, “if a subject burned 250 calories during the session, but they would have burned 100 calories at rest, the excess calorie expenditure was 150 calories.”

How they measured that energy expenditure is deeper than I’d like to dive in this article, as it strays from my point. This is where I’ll begin to dive deeper into my personal opinions and recommendations. If the study sounds interesting to you, go check out the research paper or the MASS review for more. I’d highly recommend it!

So What is Better: Lifting or Cardio?

So let’s answer this question with the help of the most recent research mentioned above.

Greg Nuckols indicated in his review of the study that it’s fair to make the following rough estimates of energy expenditure:

• 75-100 calories for low-volume session in women
• ~150 calories for low-volume session in men or high-volume session in women
• ~300 calories for high-volume session in men

Further, Nuckols explains when determining what’s good at burning calories, “lifting doesn’t hold a candle to traditional forms of cardio.”

If your primary goal with fitness is to burn calories, cardio is the way to go.

My Recommendations

So we’ve established cardio is generally better than lifting at burning calories. For those fo you interested in losing weight, this should be a helpful piece of information! It helps us narrow things down a bit, but there are probably hundreds of different forms of cardio you can choose from.

What is best?

The answer to this question will be pretty person-specific, but I can offer some general recommendations.

The more your cardio involves the entire body, the more calories you’ll likely burn.

If you run for 20 minutes, you’ll likely burn more calories than if you biked for 20 minutes. If you do plyometrics for 20 minutes, you’ll likely burn more calories than if you ran for 20 minutes.

And of course, intensity matters as well. If you run at a moderate pace for 20 minutes, you probably won’t burn as many calories as you could if you mixed sprints into that same 20-minute cardio session.

I’d be remiss if I failed to mention the value of lifting as well. While it may not burn calories at the rate of cardio, it’s still extremely valuable. Over the lifespan, having regular resistance training in your routine is likely going to help with the longevity of your health.

If burning calories is your goal, focus on cardio. But don’t abandon lifting altogether.

Again, it’s all relative and we’ll never know exactly how many calories we burn within a given training session. Hopefully the combination of this new research and recommendations will help you structure the ideal training plan.

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If you are interested in coaching to help you put together an optimal training program based on your lifestyle, goals, preferences, and more, contact me and let’s talk about what might be best for you.

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CGF