Train for specific outcomes, don’t just burn calories.
TLDR
Training sessions are not a good strategy for calorie management. Those are best suited to elicit a response from your body to put on muscle, get stronger, move better, and if you train hard enough to elicit a response, but not so much that you’re stressed out for days after, and if you let yourself recover (you can still move outside of formal workouts, just don’t wear yourself down), then you not only recover from the training, but you come back stronger and even more resilient.
Build your resting metabolic rate by building muscle. Just burning calories is like solving a complex problem using brute force math or getting a one-to-one return on investment (at best).
That, kids, is brute force, Math of Despair training.
Move more without getting sore or tired. (Walking, day to day activities, short movement breaks if you sit all day due to work)
Eat like an adult and go to bed on time.
So, you know the point of working out… isn’t to burn calories…
Right?
At least if your goal is to lose fat, build muscle, or a little bit of both
But, I get why you might have thought it was that.
Part of it is marketing and oversimplifying.
We often think weights = get big.
Never mind that muscle burns calories 24/7 = a bigger metabolic engine, better hormonal health, insulin sensitivity, etc. Plus, muscle is the organ of longevity, so it’s kind of important.
Along with that, we often think that cardio = get small, get lean, as if the shape we want is just hidden under the fat we want to get rid of.
Even though we lose muscle every year if we don’t strength train properly, eat like an adult, and generally try to live a reasonably healthy lifestyle.
Never mind that lots of hard cardio in a calorie deficit, with inadequate protein, with inadequate recovery is muscle wasting which is incredibly stressful, and detrimental to long term health.
Personal note:
When I finished college swimming I weighed 30 pounds less than I do now. I was in my early 20’s, and while that was super skinny, I was also ripped. But, add time, stress, having no idea how to eat properly, and just randomly training hard with no thought towards long term outcomes other than “Wow that was a hard workout” and it eventually became very unflattering.
Yet, I was still obsessed with abs and not putting on fat. That’s a negative. I was stuck in that mindset for many years. I drove myself into the ground and felt terrible. It wasn’t until I focused on a positive – building muscle, eating in ways to support that goal, and protecting my recovery – that things took a turn for the better.
Then you have social media, and the implication of these influencers’ posts is that there’s a direct causal relationship between their eye-catching movements and workouts and their physique.
Dirty industry secret: They didn’t get that way doing those workouts. And, if they’re super ripped, they only look that way for a small part of the year because that level of leanness is incredibly hard to maintain. They shoot months’ worth of content in a few days, but because they release that content over a long time, it gives the impression that they stay that way year round.
Personal note: As much as possible, I try to train my clients in a similar way that I train myself, while also including some variety to keep it interesting, and usually that’s to work on another important quality like coordination, quickness, or power. My conscience won’t let me sell something I don’t believe in.
Once you realized that you need to be in a calorie deficit if you want to lose weight, when it comes to the gym, you have two main options:
Either:
Lifting weights (which burns about 300-400 calories an hour)
Or, Cardio (which burns almost double that…)
And the logical part of your brain steps in and makes one of the easiest decisions it has ever had to make…
If the goal is to make your calorie deficit as big as possible, why WOULDN’T you choose the option that burns more calories?
Now I’m going to get a break things down by the numbers when it comes to making progress in the gym.
There’s a difference between burning calories and getting fit.
And although cardio might burn more calories for the 1-hour you’re in the gym each day…
Lifting weights and getting stronger will help you burn more the *other 23-hours in a day
And as you get stronger over time, will help you burn more in your workouts too, since you’ll be able to handle more and more challenging workouts
If you do this, while focusing on all the other small things you can do to burn more overall, fat-loss and maintenance becomes a LOT easier
The point of working out isn’t to burn calories.
The breakdown of daily calorie burn
- Exercise 5 – 15%
- Digestion 10 – 15%
- Non exercise movement (daily activities) 5 – 25% (easy to increase and won’t make you sore)
- Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) 50 – 70%
And…whatever tool you use to track calories burned tends to overestimate the calories burned.
Instead of making yourself miserable chasing an arbitrary goal of calories to burn, make your goals:
To get stronger and increase lean muscle mass.
Building muscle increases your BMR, makes you more insulin sensitive, improves hormones, and when you’re stronger, everything becomes easier.
Strength training doesn’t burn as many calories as cardio per session, but the overall payoff is much better because it helps increase the biggest part of your daily calorie burn, that being your BMR.
Then, if you increase protein, then you have to burn more calories through digestion, plus it spares muscle even in a calorie deficit.
Moving more outside of the gym – just finding ways to move more, but without it being a big deal, you can increase your daily calorie burn, but without the downsides of a hard cardio session. Plus, you can do this every day. This is an easy habit to form that you can keep up for life. If you have to sit all day due to work, then getting up every hour and doing ten squats is an easy way to manage blood sugar and not have to schedule in a walk.
I actually like cardio for health and to maintain qualities like speed and athleticism, but I am against it being used as a blunt tool just to burn calories. Approach it as an athlete working on skill rather than simply logging miles, time, or calories burned.
Then there’s the main aspect – Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR)
This is determined by
- Muscle mass
- Sleep – try to get at least 7 hours most nights
- Stress (Creatine can help offset stress. Rory McIlroy was taking 20mg a day when he won The Masters this year. Note: Schwartz Labs is the first brand I’ve tried that doesn’t mess up my digestion. Don’t bother with GNC or other chains. Also, a sudden increase in creatine can upset digestion, so titrate up slowly if you decide to supplement with it.)
- Hormone health – proper sleep, get rid of scented products, etc.
Take care of the things that support BMR and it becomes much, much easier to get a better body composition (muscle vs fat) and to maintain that without the heroic efforts of a Rocky training montage or the shenanigans we see on social media.
You’ll maintain a leaner, more defined look as you lose body fat.
And it’s a lot easier than chasing a calorie burn goal on the Stairmaster while trying to restrict calories.
Best,
Charlie
