Strength training and calorie burn: What good is it?
There's some old information that has been built into a lot of people's mindset that does appear to have a lot of truth to it and that is that strength training is the best kind of training for someone looking to get into and stay in shape.
I don't remember exactly why this is but I do know that especially for younger people, the bodybuilders almost never do any cardio. For them, this is counter-productive because they may actually burn too many calories if they do so. Obviously being in good cardiovascular shape has a ton of benefits that being a gym-beast doesn't have and as someone that has been on both sides of this situation I can attest to the fact that when I was a beast as far as muscle mass is concerned, I was incapable of even the lightest cardio.
The other day my knee was hurting too much to have a go at another run so instead i went to the small gym that is in my building. This can be a nice place to go to because there are not that many people in my building, and the gym is mostly completely empty, just the way I like it. There isn't a ton of equipment in there, but there is a rack of dumbbells and a universal gym cable sort of thing, and that is enough now that I am primarily focused on cardio anyway.
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I wear my smartwatch all the time now, sometimes even when I am asleep because it has this feature on it that calculates your sleep quality which is almost certainly completely full of crap but I like to look at the output.
When I was in the gym yesterday I decided to record the strength training and I was in there for an hour. I was just curious about what the output would be as far as calories burned and heartrate was concerned.
An hour in the gym is not like an hour of jogging and this is obvious information. I take breaks between sets and these can vary a great deal from one sitting session to the next. I do try to not spend most of the hour looking at my phone though and have some sort of regularity between sets. Normally I try to keep it to less than 2 minutes per break.
I wasn't doing anything in particular while I was in the gym, I was just doing all muscle groups other than my legs just to "remind them" that I still need them to perform even though my focus has been almost entirely on jogging lately.
Heart rate almost never makes it to anywhere near the levels that I would achieve even on my weak run days but perhaps that is a good thing. There is a lot of information out there that suggests that being in zone 2 for a prolonged period of time is one of the most beneficial things you can do for your overall health so maybe if I found something else to do during my breaks in sets, even if it was just walking, could probably lead to the time in the gym being better utilized.
I stayed in there longer than I normally would because I wanted to see the effects of an entire hour on the weights. I wasn't doing anything particularly intense because I don't want or need to be sore from this. I was lifting about 50% of what I would have done back when I was focused almost entirely on weight training.
Getting to over 250 active calories in an hour of what I considered to be rather light work was something that made me happy though, because that is 250 more calories than I would have burned sitting on my sofa and watching TV.
Also, even though I was specifically trying to avoid it, I still ended up a bit sore the following day. To me, this is a good thing. As someone who lifted rather intensely over the course of about 20 years, the "burn" is something I appreciate. It lets me know that I did enough. There is a big difference between being sore and being in pain though, that is something I am careful to avoid these days.
I plan on getting back out for a run as soon as my knees are willing to accept it. It's kind of funny to me that I used to loathe running but these days if I don't or can't go for a run, I don't feel like my day is complete.
But you burn a bit of calories from lifting, even a weak session like the one I did, and every bit counts!