I remember seeing a segment on CNN sometime last year with a doctor claiming to have a list of simple guidelines for losing weight. For instance, one of them was to avoid dairy at all costs. Another one was to lift weights for exercise instead of walking or running. The logic behind this was that pound-for-pound, muscle tissue burns more calories than fat (makes sense). So the more muscle you build, the higher you raise your daily caloric needs, the more weight you’ll be losing if your daily intake stays constant (and, of course, is below the threshold where you’re actually losing weight :rolleyes: ). Is this based on established fact or no?
As with almost everything else related to fitness, it depends. There are a lot of weight-training programs out there, ranging from excellent to worthless, and the same applies to aerobic training. If you’re choosing between an excellent weight training program and a worthless aerobic one, then yeah, the weight training is a better choice. But if you’re choosing between an excellent aerobic program and a worthless weight training one…
One other thing to keep in mind is the difference between weight loss and fat loss. Losing weight ain’t so hot if you’re getting fatter along the way, right? Well, adding muscle mass increases your weight, but it’ll help you burn fat. Unfortunately, that’s not something that your standard scale will reflect.
The more muscle you have, the more calories needed to maintain them, yeah. It can be a bit misleading because if you build up 1 extra lb of muscle, you only burn something like 50 extra calories per day. Having loads of muscle is helpful, but cardiovasuclar fitness is very important as well. But yeah, it is established fact that one pound of muscle burns 35-50 calories (depending on level of fitness) daily.
That seems a little high–if that were true, a 200 lb. man at 10% bf would have to eat 2800-4500 calories a day plus whatever all of his internal organs require to function just to maintain weight.
The way I’ve heard it is that the resting metabolic rate of muscle isn’t all that much higher compared to fat, but that its active metabolic rate is a lot higher.
Do both strength training and aerobic exercise. Unfortunately, I can’t find the study right now, but a very commonly cited study on weight loss found the following:
People who did strength training and cardio lost more weight than people who just did strength training, who lost more weight than peopel who just did cardio. All three groups dieted.
Of course, the study could have flaws, but in all my (admittedly limited) experience that has been true.
Hmm, you may be right, ultrafilter. All the cites I have seen have said the same 35-50 figure, but none are what you would call “reputable cites.” It could be more of the same stuff that is just repeated so much it is assumed to be true, like stretching or high protein myths.
ACSM estimates it is only 5-10 calories per pound of muscle. From here: page 5 (warning, pdf)
IMO, ACSM is as about reputable as they get, so my guess is that their estimate is closer to the money.
Ah, so: it may be true, but then how efficient is it? How many pounds of muscle could one reasonably expect to build before one starts to look like a major-league baseball player? (and I couldn’t care less what the scale says; I guess instead of losing weight, I should specify losing fat).
Let’s say you gain 10 lbs of muscle. According to the low estimate, that’s between 50 and 100 extra calories per day. I mean, you take in that much just breathing, don’t you? 
So then it would be an effect that builds cumulatively, right? As long as you keep doing strength training…
It’s really tough to give a simple answer, but as a generality, yes, the more muscle you have, the higher your metabolism will be. There are other factors though, including your level of cardiovascular fitness, your activity level, your caloric intake (eat less and your metabolism decreases) and your genes.
Anecdotal evidence, I know, but I lost more weight strength training 3-5 days a week than I did jogging 5 days a week. If you go this method, it is better to train large muscle groups (quads, pecs, glutes, abdominal or “core” muscles as they are referred to nowadays).
That’s interesting that they said to avoid dairy at all costs. Some studies have shown that calcium can aid in weight loss, so they recommend non or low-fat dairy products to help with that.
When lifting weights, you burn calories from the exertion of lifting the weights, from your body using energy to build up the muscles, and from the increase in metabolism from the increase in muscle mass. The more intense the workout, the greater the benefit will be. If someone is using very light weights and not causing the muscles any stress, then the benefit of weightlifting will be minimal.
There are many ways to exercise to lose weight, but they all depend on the person’s motivation and ability to do the activity. If you hate lifting weights, then lifting weights would not be a good way for you to lose weight no matter if it was “better” than aerobics or not.
Personally, I switched from an aerobic workout to a weightlifting workout because with aerobics, the weight loss caused my body to look “skinny”. But with weightlifting, my body looks “buff”. Even when I still had a lot of body fat, weightlifting caused the muscles to have some definition that gave my body a better look. I still looked fat, but I looked more like a big, strong guy instead of a big, fat guy.
Also consider that you’re only going to gain maybe 8-10 pounds of lean muscle mass in a year. And that’s pushing it.
Ultrafilter That’s probably about right. 2000 calories a day is just enough to a bit low for an active person of average height/weight and you’re positing a 200 pound guy with 10% body fat. He’s out of the norm even if he’s a really tall skinny guy. Any kind of tissue needs calories to support it, and if you’re talking about a really muscular guy you’re looking at a caloric load way above someone with less muscle mass. Also keep in mind that to gain muscle you need more calories than just your maintenance level.
Re: the OP. You basically need to to both since they work on different but complementary systems. Some of the main benefits of the two are: aerobic exercise changes your metabolism, especially how your body uses fat stores, while resistance training encourages your body to increase muscle mass and bone density. You need aerobic exercise for increasing oxygen usage efficiency and increasing the strength, size, and efficiency of your heart. You need resistance training or your body will start getting rid of all the bulk it doesn’t need starting with “excess” muscle tissue, since keeping your fat stores is almost always your body’s highest priority. Having more muscle does more than increase the amount of calories you need, it also changes your hormone balance and the priorities of how the calories are doled out.
When you do aerobics on a machine and it tells you in the little readout how many calories you burned, that’s not a real number. It shows how many calories an average person would expend in doing that level of activity for that length of time, but calorie usage doesn’t stop when you stop exercising. The changes in your body’s metabolism will account for a much larger change than the 100 or 200 calories you supposedly used in doing the exercise. Resistance training also uses more energy than it would seem at first. You burn calories while doing the exercise, and you burn more when you gain muscle because you have to maintain it, but you also burn calories in repairing tissues, creating new tissue, and in making the other adaptations your body needs to support the load you’re now imposing on it.
Endurance athletes have higher body fat percentages, even though they look “skinny,” than athletes who train in strength or performance-based sports. Compare sprinters with marathon runners. Which do you want to look like? From a health perspective, there are some minor tradeoffs on either side, though endurance athletes have to put up with more repetitive strain injuries than pretty much any performance based athletes do.
Anecdotally, I had my biggest fat losses right after I started a heavy lifting program. I spent two months doing a twice weekly light-weight endurance based lifting program to get my connective tissues ready for more, and at the same time doing aerobics about three times a week. At the end of that two months, I’d only lost about 2 kg. I switched to heavy lifting 2-3 times a week with the same amount of aerobic exercise and lost about 2 kg in the next week. Over the next two months I dropped another 6 kg. The heavy lifting program takes about 15-25 minutes less per session than the light program I was using at first, it doesn’t drain me as much, and I still lost more fat doing it than I did from doing almost exclusively endurance-based exercise.
Gahh! That should be "…to do both
Studies have definitely shown that the higher the dairy content of a diet (assuming equal calories) the greater the fat and weight loss. Here is one link and since it was revealed years ago I have never seen any evidence to refute it.
Emphasis of course mine. By increasing the efficiency of oxygen usage, isn’t that less conducive to weight loss? I mean, isn’t inefficiency in creating ATP more conducive to weight loss (less efficient taking more glucose and thus burning more calories)?
This has been my experience as well. I began on-and-off weight training a couple of years ago, but really let myself go last year. Last November and December, I put on a scary amount of fat - so much that my doctor freaked out and ordered me to lose it. (I’m sure stuffing my face on a cruise didn’t help, but I had already gotten big. I can’t even look at the cruise pictures.)
In January, I went on a diet and started doing a lot of cardio - which I hate. I hardly lost any fat.
Around the beginning of February, I stopped dieting, almost completely eliminated cardio, and went back to intense weight training. The fat melted away as scary-fast as I had put it on. Two months later, I’m more muscular than I’ve ever been.
That’s been my experience, of course. YMMV and all that.
Everybody is different. It is certainly true weight training can be used to maintain muscle while losing fat. Active muscle also has higher metabolic demands than fat. Some people would do better with a (slightly) hypocaloric diet and weight training, others would do better with cardio than with weights. “Circuit training” was long considered the best way to lose fat with weights, and might still be.
Dairy products are high in calcium, which is thought to help regulate appetite. Many dairy products (cheese, etc.) are high in fat. Eating a lot of low fat dairy is thought to aid weight loss. Eating a lot of cheese and ice cream makes it hard to maintain a hypocaloric diet.
Simply put, aerobic exercise will increase glucocorticoid secretion. These stress hormones can have a negative impact on building and maintainance of muscle mass (perhaps by modulating certain inflammatory cytokines and elevating myostatin).
I’d say for basic “good health”, a combination of both resistance training and moderate aerobic exercise is a must. If you’re looking to become Mr. Universe, heavy aerobic training is a bad idea. If you’re training for a marathon, you’ll find resistance training does little more than maintain tone. Some rare specimines can build lots of muscle while doing heavy aerobic training, but the average person will find aerobics tend to undermine rapid bulking.
Muscle is one of the top fat-burning organs. Somewhat paradoxically, aerobic training tends to favor glycolysis over fatty acid beta-oxidation, as the former is a less oxygen-expensive process for generating ATP, and typically aerobic training is designed to produce oxygen debt, increase erythropoietin production, subsequently increasing RBC count, and hence oxygen carrying-capacity. Your body actually switches almost exclusively to glycolysis while in oxygen debt (by down-regulating the action of transcription factors called peroxisome proliferator activator receptors, which are among the “master switches” of fatty acid metabolism at the gene transcription level), and will only start burning fat once sugar stores are depleted. This is good for keeping weight off, but it’s surprisingly hard to loose fat with the 30min. aerobic exercise folks typically do a few times a week. Without a regimine of weight training built in, that level of aerobic activity is unlikely to help you shed pounds very quickly. It’s a maintainance routine.
There’s no question, though, that aerobic exercise is great for your heart. So you gotta do it. Just don’t neglect the weights. You don’t have to go crazy. 2-3 times a week is good enough for some to maintain or moderately increase muscle mass and improve tone while also doing regular moderate aerobic training (30-60 min/day).
In short, forget the “vs.” angle. It’s all good, in the right proportion.
Look.
Here’s the M Smith easy guide to fitness:
-Each three balanced meals a day
-Limit yourself to reasonible portions
-Avoid shit that’s obviously bad for you - soda, McDonalds, ice cream, donuts, fried food, etc
-Don’t eat late at night
-Do SOMETHING in the form of exercise every day (or as often as you can) - run, swim, rollarblade, lift weights, whatever
-Try to do some kind of weight training at least 3 times a week
It probably won’t make you look like Brad Pitt but lets face it - If you were that disciplined in your fitness, you would already look like that, right?