The main purpose to lose weight is to burn off the fat and look great. So, which method is better? Lift weights or cardio exercises? My belief is a mixture of both with a lot more emphasis on cardio.For many guys, they will only attempt to lift weights thinking that that is all they need to lose weight, build muscle, and look great. Well, they are all wrong.
I, myself, and many others I have talked to have been down this road. To build muscle, you are lifting heavy weights and doing low reps to basically tear the muscle so that it can rebuild itself bigger. This low rep process does not do much to “burn off” the fat. The other thing is that the fat tissue actually lies above the muscle tissue so myself and the others I have spoken with built bigger muscles but we actually looked fatter and gained more weight. We already had our fat weight but we gained muscle weight, which is actually ok if the fat went away. It is actually not unusual to lose fat, gain muscle, gain weight from all the muscle weight and still look good.
Think about all the sports where the athletes are toned but not too muscular. Some that come to mind are water polo, soccer, gymnastics, and boxing. What do all these sports have in common? Lots of cardio type exercises. With water polo, swimming is a great exercise, especially when you are doing laps. With soccer, you are basically running non-stop and doing lots of lower body exercises. With boxing, you are doing lots of footwork and upper body exercises.You have to realize that all these exercises, lower body or upper body, has to do with doing high amounts of reps and low resistance. This is how you “burn” the fat and tone your body.
Think about boxing type exercises like using the punching bag. You are doing lots of footwork simulating that you are in the ring with another person and you are continually punching the bag over and over again. You are not putting any weight resistance on your upper or lower body but you are exercising your body.The other good thing about all of these cardio type exercises is that it increases your metabolism. Having a high metabolism rate actually helps to keep the fat off. However, occasional cardio exercises will not achieve this. You have to do regular cardio exercises to make an impact on your metabolism rate.The last bit of item to consider is, of course, your diet. A balanced diet can really move things along faster if you are doing regular exercises.