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Lifting weights is a poor way to burn calories. It’s a great way to build muscle and be healthier, but lifting weights is less efficient than aerobic exercise in terms of pure calorie burn.

e.g. Moderate intensity aerobic exercise burns 200-300 calories in 30 minutes. Moderate intensity weightlifting is 90-130 in the same time. You need vigorous weightlifting to get up to 250 in 30 minutes. Even taking into consideration post-exercise burn, weight lifting will at best get you too the same efficiency as aerobic exercise.

Example data from: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/323922#calculating...

Weightlifting is great but it’s not better for burning calories. It’s much better for retaining muscle while dieting, though.

I can't find the link but I remember reading an article about weight lifting raising the resting calorie use for quite some time after the exercise. Also as you say you retain more muscle, and that muscle requires calories at rest potentially altering the overall calculation. I still agree with the overall premise that fixing your diet is probably the most important aspect of weight loss though.

May main take-away was from the article it read that they focused on running as the primarily measured exercise. So it might not provide the best full picture when looking at other exercise methods.

For sure, excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC) is a thing. It is real and measurable. But it’s not some crazy effect that offsets the fact that aerobic exercise is about 2x as calorie intensive as weight training during the actual exercise. As I recall the best way to drive up EPOC is to engage in high intensity interval training. HIIT has a much larger effect on EPOC than weight training (again, if I recall correctly).

Calories burned from extra muscle are not as important as people like to imagine. It’s like cardio. Do enough and it has an effect, but in terms of what normal humans should expect, it’s not going to do much, because normal people are simply not going to build enough muscle to matter much. The average person isn’t going to build 40 extra pounds of lean mutant. Most of the claims about how many calories muscle will burn are also not backed up by any science so far as I can tell.

I do agree that this article doesn’t cover a lot of stuff, though. I’m doubtful about the stuff claimed even about running because it feels so have wavey. The one potentially compelling study was on women who went from sedentary to running half marathons and the claim is that they “barely” burned more calories at the end than at the beginning, but “barely” is almost meaningless. Plus they did burn more so the whole thesis is in question.

Lol. “40 extra pounds of lean mutant.”

Too late to fix the typos now.

What's the metric used to calculate average here? And what range of workout is included in the data. Seems like there was just too little focus given to this to call it a myth outright.

It also runs against my own experience. For the past six months I've begun exercising and changed nothing else and I've seen amazing improvement in all aspects of my life including losing fat. The type of workout I'm doing is full body and covers a range of different movements and weights. And arguably anyone serious about losing weight would do the same. If all they're doing is comparing running to dieting then I can't help but feel it's short sighted.

> I've always heard that humans, due to our upright posture, are extremely efficient when it comes to walking and running and so if you want to increase you calories usage via exercise you should lift weights as we are much less efficient at this.

Weight lifting builds muscles. It does makes you more hungry. In addition, you can end up heavier then originally, because muscles weight more then fat. I mean, yes, it will be good weight, the weight composed of muscle, there is no rational reason to go out of way to avoid it. But, it is not loosing weight.

Maybe by "fixed budget", he actually means "fixed budget per kilogram".