barbell cardio
I’ve been a pretty good proponent of barbell cardio for quite some time now. I’ve been lifting weights for years, and have never understood just how much cardio I had to do simply to build muscle mass. I recently came across a study that investigated the amount of calories burned while lifting a pound of barbell. The results were shocking. You could burn over 500 calories per hour, which is more than you burn in just 20 minutes of running on a treadmill.
What is surprising is that the calorie-burn levels were higher in this study than the one in the study of exercise-induced weight loss. This suggests that the body is burning calories while it’s exercising. This is also not uncommon to see people with very low body fat burn more calories than a person with a lot of body fat.
This is a common misconception, but I was able to prove this. I measured the fat percentage of a group of people (including myself) at the beginning and end of their day and compared the results. The results were quite similar, and they were high even for the people with the lowest body fat percentage. This suggests that the body was burning calories while it exercised.
I’m also not one to discourage people from doing anything that might help burn fat. In fact, I’m always happy to see people doing those activities.
There is one caveat though. It is possible that the amount of calories burned while exercising was different when the person started and finished exercising. In other words, it might have been easier for people to burn fat, but they were more likely to burn more calories when exercising.
It’s hard to say for sure if this is true, but it could be. Because it’s so hard to accurately measure the amount of calories burned in a workout, it’s not impossible to see this as a possible explanation for the barbell cardio effect. But again, we can’t say for sure because it’s a pretty small sample size.
It certainly isn’t a small sample size. There are many more studies that show people are more likely to burn more calories when they exercise.
Thats an interesting idea, but I have to wonder if the barbell cardio effect works just because its hard to keep track of the calories we burn. If the effect is true, then we would expect higher calorie burn with higher intensity exercises. So maybe people who burn more calories will actually be doing more cardio, not less. It could have a small but significant effect.
The other idea is that people just get more calories burned from cardio when they are at higher intensities. But the intensity of the workouts is controlled by the intensity of the calorimetric measuring device. It’s a bit difficult to be sure of this idea, but if the idea that people want to lose weight is that they are more likely to burn more calories at higher intensities, then we would expect a higher intensity cardio workout to have a slightly larger effect on decreasing body weight.
I know this idea is a bit like the “lazy” theory of weight loss, but people are really really into this theory. And because this theory is so much more powerful than the “fitness” theory, people tend to be very dismissive of the fitness theory as well.
