Tracking calories can feel like a daunting task. You might wonder where to start or what will work best for you. People often overlook the benefits of weightlifting when it comes to burning calories. Studies show that resistance training can help you lose fat and maintain muscle when you lose weight, and it may even boost your metabolism. So, how many calories does weightlifting burn? This article will provide valuable insights, including the best app to track macros, to help you understand how weight lifting contributes to calorie burn and learn actionable strategies to maximize your calorie-burning potential during workouts.
One solution that can help you achieve your goals is Cal AI's app for weightlifting posture correction. Good form is essential for maximizing calorie burn during resistance training and reducing your risk of injury. The app uses artificial intelligence to analyze your posture in real-time during your workouts and provide corrective feedback so you can make adjustments on the spot. Incorporating a calorie tracker can help you monitor your energy expenditure and align your nutrition with your fitness objectives, further enhancing your weightlifting results.
Lifting weights burns calories. While it may not torch as many calories as cardio exercises like running, it contributes to overall calorie expenditure. Weightlifting increases muscle mass, which in turn boosts metabolism and helps the body burn more calories even at rest.
A typical weight training session lasts between 45 and 75 minutes, but after this training style, the body needs to repair the muscles and replenish their energy. This means that post-exercise, the body continues to burn calories for hours to days after the training session. The body using more oxygen means that it requires more caloric expenditure, leading to a high and increased metabolic rate, which means more calories burned, which leads to greater fat loss.
Resistance training is a fantastic way to build muscle and burn calories (fat). You won’t see the instant calorie burn count that you will with cardio workouts, but the long-term gains outweigh the short ones with cardio. It’s also good to remember that the everyday contractions of muscles contribute to how many calories you burn in a day. The more muscles, the higher the rate of caloric burn.
A combination of both forms of exercise will provide the best results regarding calories burned and body composition improvements. This is also the case when it comes to reducing calories through nutrition.
It’s more beneficial for your body composition and health to reduce calories through exercise rather than just nutrition, as exercise requires the muscles of the body and the heart to function at a higher rate than usual, which helps to strengthen the muscles and vital organs.
Of course, some exercises burn more calories than others, so if your aim is to work as intensely as possible and burn as many calories as possible while resistance training, you’ll want to focus more on compound movements such as squats and deadlifts. The more muscle groups an exercise requires, the more calories you’ll be able to burn.
It’s essential to note that with any workout, be it weight lifting or cardiovascular, the calories burnt are dependent on you as an individual, and many factors can affect this. For example...
The intensity of your workout will significantly affect your calorie burn during and after the workout. The higher the intensity (this can be manipulated through weight lifted, reps/sets, and tempo/time under tension), the more calories you’ll burn.
Simply put, if you lift at 70% of your 1RM for sets of 8 reps, you will burn more calories than if you lift at 40% of your 1RM max for eight reps.
Another factor to consider is the movements you’re performing. If your gym session includes a lot of bigger compound movements or larger muscles, such as your legs, you will burn more calories than you would if your session focuses on isolation movements and smaller muscle groups.
A factor that gets overlooked a lot is nutrition. The simple rule with fat loss is to be in a calorie deficit, but at the same time, when lifting weights, you need to make sure you are fuelling your body effectively for the activity you’re performing. You want to have a consistent flow of fuel for your body and ensure your diet is full of clean, unprocessed foods to help you hit workouts hard and effectively and fuel your body to build more muscle post-work, leading to a high metabolic rate.
Ensuring you get enough protein, fats, and carbs is essential, and eating six small meals a day can be an effective way to ensure this and that your body uses all the nutrients you put in.
A calorie is a measure of energy. If you’ve studied physics, you are familiar with joules, a measure of power, and one calorie = 4.184 joules. When we say calorie in English, we often mean kilocalories, or kcal, which means a thousand calories. For example, the typical man has a daily energy need of 2 500 kcal, and the typical woman needs 2 000 kcal.
Every second of every day, we expend calories to keep our bodies going and fuel our movements. When we talk about calories burned from weight lifting or other forms of exercise, it’s essential to distinguish between your constantly ongoing basal metabolic rate and the extra calories you burn from the actual lifting.
Even when you are not moving, your body uses much energy to keep your heart, brain, liver, kidneys, and other organs running. This constantly ongoing energy burn is called your basal metabolic rate, or resting metabolic rate, and it is simply the energy it takes to keep you alive. Your basal metabolic rate (shortened BMR) is relatively stable but can increase or decrease slightly depending on how much food you eat or if you’re injured or sick. Primarily, however, it’s determined by your lean body mass.
It would cost a human body approximately 0.23 kcal × 5 = 1.15 kcal to lift 100 kg one meter into the air. Lift 100 kg a hundred times, and you’ll have burned around 115 kcal extra on top of your basal metabolic rate.
Let’s say your basal metabolic rate is 70 kcal per hour, and you lift 100 kg one hundred times in an hour at the gym. Then your total calorie expenditure that hour is 70 kcal (from BMR) + 115 kcal (from lifting) = 185 kcal. This is a simplified example, and many other factors determine how many calories you burn when lifting a certain weight, such as:
The most accurate and practical (but still pretty impractical) way to measure the caloric cost of lifting weights is to do so while having your exhaled air analyzed. Because oxygen can generate a specific amount of energy, one can calculate how much energy someone uses by measuring the difference between inhaled and exhaled oxygen concentration.
In a strength training context, this is accomplished by hooking participants up to a metabolic cart and wheeling that around with them while they complete a gym workout. If you do sets of 8–12 reps and rest ~90 seconds between sets, the accuracy will be higher. If you do powerlifting-style workouts with 1–5 reps per set and five minutes of rest between sets, the accuracy (and your caloric burn per minute) will be lower.
The more work you do in your workout, the more calories you burn. Typically, doing a medium-to-high number of reps per set with short rest intervals and lighter weights will allow you to do more work and burn more calories per minute than low-rep training with heavy weights and long rests between sets.
Compound exercises using multiple muscle groups allow you to use heavier weights, meaning you will do more work and burn more calories than isolation exercises that use light weights and only work on individual muscle groups.
Because of the large muscle groups in this region, lower-body exercises often enable you to lift more weight and do more work. Compound upper-body exercises like the bench press or lat pulldowns also allow you to do plenty of work.
You might have heard of the afterburn effect. It refers to the fact that after an intense workout, your metabolism is elevated above resting levels for some time, burning additional calories. This is reflected in increased oxygen consumption following strenuous exercise, and the scientific name for the phenomenon is Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption—or EPOC.
One reason for the EPOC effect is that your body needs to restore depleted energy storages like glycogen and creatine after anaerobic exercise (like weight lifting), thus consuming more oxygen than usual until this is done. So, how much does the afterburn effect, or EPOC, contribute to the calories burned from lifting weights?
Luckily for us, this was also measured in the previously mentioned study. Nine of the participants kept their masks on to collect their exhaled air for an additional hour after the lifting session was completed, and their oxygen consumption was compared to their resting levels, thus enabling the researchers to calculate the extra calories burned in the afterburn effect.
The results disappoint anyone hoping for a significant effect: only a net additional 7 kcal was burned compared to their normal resting levels, most of which was burned within the first 20 minutes after the workout’s cessation.
After that time, there were no longer significant differences in oxygen consumption compared to their normal breathing. So, while there is an afterburn effect, or EPOC from lifting weights, the effect is minimal, with a mere 7 kcal on average after a 51-minute intense strength training workout.
About now is a good time to mention two things:
I will explain both points, but let’s start with number one. As you’ve read several times by now, the amount of calories you burn when exercising is determined mainly by the amount of work you do. That is, kilos lifted, or miles walked, cycled, or swam. Lifting weights, with its short bursts of activity followed by (relatively) long rest periods, is not an effective way for humans to do a lot of work.
We can do way more work when we work continuously at a low-to-medium intensity for a prolonged time. Consider walking: As a rule of thumb, we burn about 0.7 kcal per kilogram of body weight per kilometer. For example, a person weighing 100 kg burns 70 kcal every km. This translates to about 0.5 kcal burned per pound of body weight and mile walked in imperial units.
For example, a person weighing 220 pounds burns 110 calories every mile walked. Walking six kilometers (or 3.75 miles) would mean that a 100 kg person has burned about 420 kcal, which a decently fit person could do in an hour.
That is the same number of calories we get if we plug in 100 kg body weight and 60-minute workout time in the weight-lifting calorie calculator at the beginning of this article. Still, I would wager that most people find walking for an hour far easier than intense weight lifting, with 90 seconds of rest between sets of ten reps at 65–70% of your 1RM.
If you were to jog, you would both be able to cover distance faster and increase your calorie cost per kilometer by about 30–40%. My point is that it is usually easier to burn many calories doing some form of low-to-medium intensity, steady-state cardiovascular exercise than lifting weights.
Even cardio, however, isn’t very effective for weight loss.4 This is probably because we tend to compensate by over-eating the rest of the day and being less active following a workout. This brings us to point two: burning calories shouldn’t be your main reason for lifting weights.
Strength training sculpts your body, but not because of the calorie burn. It does so by building muscle and burning fat. What happens when someone starts lifting weights, even if they don’t change anything about their diet? They gain muscle and lose fat at the same time. This is seen time after time in scientific training studies.
Strength training signals your muscles to grow; simultaneously, your body draws from your fat storage. If you want to lose fat, you accomplish that mainly by changing your diet and inducing a calorie deficit. You should strength train throughout the weight-loss phase to ensure that it is the fat you lose, not lean muscle mass. If you want to change your physique and body composition, don’t stare yourself blind at how many calories lifting weights burns. The effects go beyond that.
When maximizing calorie burn during weightlifting, you want to think outside the box. In an ideal world, you’d be able to complete a minimum of 180 minutes of steady-state cardio a week, three days of heavy strength training, and a HIIT session or two. But let’s face it, most people don’t have the time. That’s where tweaking your routine to combine strength and cardio into one high-intensity session can kill two birds with one stone.
We’ll hedge by noting if your goal is to build strength, hypertrophy, or power specifically, this method is not ideal. It’s also not perfect for methodically building endurance through intentional zone 2 training and VO2 max sessions. When you manipulate the specific variables of any routine, there will be some give-and-take to get to your priority. If that priority is weight loss with minimal time in the gym, make this your bread and butter.
The more muscle mass you use, the more calories your body needs to fuel that movement. For example, isolation exercises that focus on only one muscle at a time, like bicep curls, won’t require anywhere close to the same calories as a compound exercise that works multiple muscles simultaneously, like lat pulldowns.
One study found that lat pulldowns burn 20 percent more calories than bicep curls, and squats burn 35 percent more calories than leg extensions. To use more muscle groups during your workouts, do compound exercises like,
Compared to lifting heavier weights for fewer reps, lifting lighter weights for more reps nearly doubles calorie burn, according to a study published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. If you’re worried about your gains taking a hit, don’t be. Several studies have confirmed you can build the same amount of muscle using light or heavy weights. There is a point where the weight is too light for muscle growth.
The TL;DR: you must still push yourself hard enough to see results. Find a weight between 40 to 60 percent of the maximum you could lift for that exercise, and rep it until I can only eke out one to two more reps. This should land somewhere in the 15 to 30-rep range for most people. If you can lift over 30 reps, it’s time to increase your weight.
The most important thing you can do to burn more calories is to improve your workout efficiency. During a traditional strength training workout, time is spent resting between sets. This is important if your goal is to maximize muscle growth and strength, but it could be more helpful for burning calories. Using circuit training to your advantage, you can increase the reps, sets, and aerobic intensity you put in during your workout without raising your time at the gym.
Circuit training has been shown to increase muscle mass and reduce body fat in a fraction of the time of a regular strength session. To do it, create two to three mini circuits by stacking each with four compound exercises. Complete the exercises in each circuit back-to-back with a 15 to 20-second breather to transition between exercises. Repeat each circuit three to five times before moving on to the following circuit.
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