Cardio vs. Weight Training

I read a great article from Women's Health (April 2009). I'm going to give excerpts of most of the article over the next few Sundays and Thursdays because I love it so much.

Part One:

Torch Calories 24/7
Though cardio burns more calories than strength training during those 30 sweaty minutes, pumping iron slashes more overall. A study in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research found that women who completed an hour-long strength-training workout burned an average of 100 more calories in the 24 hours afterward than they did when they hadn't lifted weights. At three sessions a week, that's 15,000 calories a year, or about four and a half pounds of fat--without having to move a muscle.

What's more, increasing that afterburn is as easy as upping the weight on your bar. In a study in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, women burned nearly twice as many calories in the two hours after their workout when they lifted 85% of their max load for eight reps than when they did more reps (15) at a lower weight (45% of their max).

There's a longer term benefit to all that lifting, too: Muscle accounts for about a third of the average woman's weight, so it has a profound effect on her metabolism, says Kenneth Walsh, director of Boston University School of Medicine's Whitaker Cardiovascular Institute. Specifically, that effect is to burn calories, because muscle, unlike fat, is metabolically active. In English: Muscle chews up calories even when you're not in the gym. Replace 10 pounds of fat with 10 pounds of lean muscle and you'll burn an additional 25-50 calories a day without even trying.

Stay tuned for part 2 on Thursday...bottom line--lift some weight ladies!!!