Weight Training Does It Better or Does it!!!!!!!!

Weight Training Does it Better -- Or Does It?

Muscle burns more fat. Weight training is increasingly recommended as a fat-busting tool because some experts say extra muscle burns more energy than body fat at rest, so if you develop more muscle and have a higher muscle to fat ratio than before, you must burn extra energy and more stored fat as a result. This is true and has been shown in metabolic studies. However, the differences are not that dramatic; perhaps less than a few tens of calories per day for each pound of muscle increased, for most people.
Does that mean you shouldn’t worry about weight training? Certainly not, because weight training has many other benefits for health and performance, not the least of which is extra muscle. It’s just that this advantage has been somewhat overstated and we need to get this fat burning thing right in order to develop the best weight loss and performance programs.
Getting the afterburn. Okay, so extra muscle does not provide that much advantage, but what about the afterburn? The 'afterburn', or the amount of energy you use after you stop exercising, has been promoted as an important slimming idea. If you can get afterburn, which is really another way of saying your metabolism increases for several hours or longer after a particular exercise, then that’s a bonus because you burn fat during the exercise and after you cease as well. Will the fun ever stop!
However, this idea has recently been reconsidered as well. An article in the Journal of Sports Science reported that despite some promising early studies of this effect, the idea has not proven to be as useful as first thought.
Exercise scientists call this afterburn effect EPOC, which stands for Excess Post-exercise Oxygen Consumption. The authors of that study say that the high intensities required -- greater than about 75 percent of maximum heart rate -- are probably beyond what most people wanting to lose weight can cope with in sustained exercise. So the afterburn advantage from lifting weights or running fast is there, but you need to be able to sustain that intensity, which means a lot of hard work. No secrets there, I'm sure.
We also need to consider how fuel is used preferentially according to how your body stores are maintained. After you do a vigorous or long workout, your blood and muscle glucose will be much lower than before you started. Low glucose stores signal the body to burn fat preferentially. So after hard exercise that uses a lot of glucose, the body switches to burning fat. That's why all energy expenditure is important, not just fat burning during exercise.