“Lifting weights is better than cardio for losing fat.”
Lifting weights is not better than cardio for losing fat.
Lift because it builds and protects muscle and improves your shape, not because it beats cardio at burning fat. If you have been skipping cardio because you heard lifting burns more fat, that belief does not hold up, and you do not have to pick a side.
If you only lift, add some cardio you like. If you only do cardio, add two lifting sessions a week. Judge progress by your waist and how your clothes fit, not the scale alone.
An 8-month randomized trial and a 15-trial meta-analysis both found cardio takes off more fat than lifting, not less, and two large meta-analyses show lifting alone trims only about 1 to 2 pounds of fat. The trials are short and mostly in overweight adults, so the exact gap could shift, but the direction is consistent.
Lifting weights is not better than cardio for losing fat. Across 15 trials, cardio took off about 2.5 pounds more fat than lifting over a few months, while lifting added about 2.8 pounds more muscle. The grain of truth is that on a diet, more of the weight lifters lose is fat, because they keep more muscle; lifting is the better muscle keeper, not the better fat burner. In the trials, the best results came from eating in a modest calorie deficit and doing both cardio and lifting, which kept more muscle than cardio alone while fat came off.
In an 8-month randomized trial of overweight adults with no diet change, the lifting group lost 0.6 pound of fat, which was not clearly different from zero, while the cardio group, training about 12 miles' worth a week on treadmills, elliptical trainers or exercise bikes, lost 3.7 pounds. The 15-trial meta-analysis also found cardio trimmed about 0.4 inch more off the waist. Against doing nothing, lifting alone cut fat by about 1.2 pounds in 54 trials of healthy adults and by about 2.2 pounds in trials of adults with overweight, and added about 1.8 pounds of muscle. In one trial of dieting older adults, fat loss did not clearly differ between the exercise groups: over 6 months, lifters lost about 16 pounds of fat and the cardio group about 14, with about the same weight loss. Because the lifters kept more muscle, about 86 percent of the weight they lost was fat, compared with about 70 percent for the cardio group (our calculation from the trial's group averages).
Can lifting help you get leaner?
Yes. Lifting alone lowers body fat percentage by about 1.5 points, partly by trimming fat and partly by adding muscle, and it is the exercise that keeps muscle when you diet. Done together with cardio, it gave the biggest drop in body fat percentage and waist size in the 8-month trial.
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