Free Weight Loss Program Vs. Exercise Machines

A lot of people are told they can expect to lose up to two pounds of fat each week with a program of regular aerobic exercise.

Some do. But a lot of people fail to see anything in the way of meaningful results, even after months of trying.

It’s easy to think the problem lies with you. Is it because your metabolism is slow? Are you getting older and burning calories at a slower rate? Is it in your genes? You stick to the program, and still you don’t lose any weight.

What’s going on?

If you’re not losing weight, it’s probably not your age, your metabolism, or your genetics that are causing the problem. It’s simply the fact that conventional aerobic exercise programs are not a particularly effective way to drop the pounds.

By aerobic exercise, I mean things like cycling, walking, rowing or jogging, usually done 3-4 times each week for 20-60 minutes in the so-called “fat burning zone.”

Despite what we’ve been told, this type of program has only a minor effect on weight loss. There’s been enough research over the last 25 years to convince almost anyone that aerobic exercise alone is not a very effective way to lose weight.

Let me give you a few examples…

In a review of several hundred weight loss studies, Dr. Wayne Miller and colleagues at The George Washington University Medical Center looked at 493 studies carried out between 1969 and 1994 [5]. Miller and his associates wanted to determine whether adding aerobic exercise to a low-calorie diet accelerates weight loss. And what he found was that diet and aerobic exercise provides only a very marginal benefit (in terms of weight loss) when compared to diet alone.

The average weight loss after a 15-week program of regular aerobic exercise was seven pounds. Over the same period, dieting cut weight by roughly 17 pounds. When exercise and diet were combined, average weight loss was 20 pounds — just three pounds more than diet alone.

A study completed at Appalachian State University also shows that aerobic exercise has little effect on body composition over a 12-week period [9]. The research team assigned a group of 91 obese women to one of four groups. Group one followed a restricted calorie diet (1,200 – 1,300 calories per day), while group two performed aerobic exercise for 45 minutes, five days each week. A third group combined exercise and diet. The fourth group acted as controls.

The exercise-only group lost just three pounds. This is despite the fact they exercised for almost four hours each week. Not surprisingly, the women combining diet and exercise got the best results, losing 16 pounds of fat. However, this was only one pound more than the group on the diet. These disappointing results led the researchers to conclude that aerobic exercise has only a “minor, nonsignificant effect” on fat loss.

A study at Pennsylvania State University shows similar results [4]. A group of men took part in a 12-week program of diet and exercise. Half the men dieted, while the rest used a combination of diet and aerobic exercise. Despite the fact they trained three times each week for up to 50 minutes, under the watchful eye of certified personal trainers, the exercise and diet group lost only one pound more fat than the diet-only group.

Research carried in the Journal of Applied Physiology also shows that aerobic exercise has a minor effect on fat loss [11]. A group of 24 obese men was assigned to either a low- or high-intensity exercise group for 12 weeks. The men were told to maintain their dietary habits during the study.

The exercise program consisted of cycling at either low-intensity (40% VO2max) or high-intensity (70% VO2max) three times per week. Each workout burned about 350 calories. The duration of each workout for subjects in the low-intensity and high-intensity training program was 57 and 33 minutes, respectively.

After analyzing the results, the researchers conclude that exercise training “did not lead to significant changes in body weight and body composition.”

One of the main criticisms of weight loss studies is the small number of participants they use. The more people that take part in a study, the more reliable the results. But the challenge for researchers is to stop people dropping out. When a research group from the University of Georgia attempted to examine the effect of aerobic exercise on fat loss, more than half the subjects quit before the study was finished [3]!

But even with a large number of subjects, the results aren’t much better.

As part of the HERITAGE Family Study, one of the largest well-controlled training studies of its kind, researchers followed a large group of 557 men and women were followed as they embarked on a 20-week exercise program [13].

Each subject was required to exercise three times per week for an average of 42 minutes. Researchers even went to the trouble of having each bout of exercise monitored by an exercise technician and a computer.

Following a grand total of 60 exercise sessions over a period of almost six months, the average amount of fat lost was slightly less than two pounds, prompting scientists to admit that aerobic exercise “is not a major factor” in weight loss

Anyone who has ever been in a gym before is familiar with the gleaming banks of shiny exercise machines. Coming in all shapes and sizes, they are usually cause for the newcomer to the gym to pause and ask, “What IS all of that stuff?”

Well, according to the price that the gym paid for any one piece of that equipment, I certainly hope that it not only stimulates your muscles, but also cooks your breakfast, washes your car, and brings the kids home from soccer practice! Now the question becomes whether or not those machines were worth the price, or if you’d be better off doing a home aerobics video with a can of soup in each hand….

Personally, I would advise you to get the low-sodium version of the soup, serve it up alongside a tomato sandwich, and then go buy yourself some free weights. Yes, that is just my opinion, but it does come with some scientific reasoning behind it.

Natural movement vs. Controlled movement

One of the things that you need to remember is that when you are exercising, you are training for LIFE. You may spend an hour a day atthe gym, but that still leaves 23 other hours for your muscles to function without the aid of that fancy equipment.

Whenever you do any given exercise, the movement of your body during that exercise is called the Range of Motion. The greater and more difficult the Range of Motion, the more effective the exercise is, because your body has to work harder to perform that movement.

Let’s take a classic dumbbell bicep curl for our case study. If you aren’t familiar with the movement, it is basically performed by standing up straight with your palms facing forward, and a pair of dumbbells held down at your sides. You concentrically contract your biceps (also known as flexing your elbow) to bring the dumbbells up to approximately shoulder level, and then repeat the movement for a prescribed number of repetitions.

Let’s take that same muscle movement and do it using a bicep curl machine. You sit down, brace your upper arms on a pad, grasp 2 handles that are in front of you, and do that same fancy elbow flexing movement to move the handles in an upward motion. Pretty easy stuff so far, right?

Now let’s examine the muscles that are used in this motion. Wait – I thought we were concentrically contracting the biceps? That is correct, and if you are using the bicep curl machine, that is pretty much ALL you are doing. For one, you are sitting down. You know, like you did all day at work, and then in your car on the way tothe gym . Then, your upper arms are braced on a nice soft pad to keep your upper body stable while you pull the handles upwards. The machine has effectively limited the muscles used in this exercise to the biceps, as well as the muscles in your forearms and fingers as you grip the handles.

Let us now sidestep over to the weight room where the dumbbells are kept, and once again get in the start position for a standing bicep curl with the dumbbells. Notice the term “standing”. You know, like you DIDN’T do all day at work, and hopefully also did not do in your car on the way tothe gym. So before we even start the exercise, we are using more muscles than we did on the machine – namely the leg muscles.

Now let’s pick up a 10 lb dumbbell in each hand. We’ve just added 20 lbs to our body weight. What is keeping us from losing our center of balance and falling clean over? The abdominal muscles and the muscles of the lower back and spine. Now we are using our legs, our abs, and our back. Flex those elbows and start to raise thedumbbells . Now our center of gravity has become a fluid state, and our legs, back, and abs all have to constantly compensate to maintain posture. Oh, and the biceps are also in on the action by this point, as are the forearms, the fingers, and the shoulder girdle.

We now have the dumbbells all the way up and it’s time to start lowering them again, via an eccentric contraction of the biceps (also know as extending the elbow). What muscle group controls the extension of the elbow? The triceps on the back of the arm.

Did you lose track yet?

It’s okay if you did because you have illustrated the point:

Machine Bicep Curl: Uses the biceps, forearms, and fingers
Cost: Thousands of dollars

Standing Dumbbell Bicep Curl: Uses the biceps, forearms, fingers, legs, abs, back, triceps, and shoulders.
Cost: $40 for a good set of dumbbells that can be used for dozens of other exercises

In a nutshell, free weight exercises simply USE MORE MUSCLES than machines do, which make them more effective. Does that mean that the machines are a complete waste? Absolutely not! In some circumstances it is BETTER to stabilize the muscles being used in any given movement. However, those circumstances are the exception, rather than the rule.

So what do you do? Change up your routine, and incorporate free weights as well as machine exercises. However, keep the machine work to a minimum – say 20% of your total time spent working with weights. Spend the other 80% developing your stabilizer muscles, your sense of balance and coordination, and if nothing else – just standing up!

What about your metabolic rate?

One popular claim is that aerobic exercise leads to an increase in your metabolic rate. However, researchers conducting the HERITAGE Family Study found that almost six months of aerobic exercise had no effect on resting metabolic rate [13].

Some studies do show that elite athletes have a higher metabolic rate than weight-matched controls. However, scientists have been unable to establish whether this is due to a higher calorie intake, a superior level of fitness or if it exists simply as an after effect of their last training session [8].

Furthermore, when an increase in physical activity results in a calorie deficit (which it’ll need to if you want to lose weight) there is research to show that the metabolic rate does not rise at all [2, 8].

Another popular misconception is the idea that aerobic exercise increases caloric expenditure for several hours after a bout of exercise, thus making a further contribution to fat loss. Unfortunately this is not always the case.

Excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC), which is the name given to the increase in calorie expenditure following a workout, is more likely to occur after high-intensity exercise. Moderate-intensity aerobic exercise (such as walking or jogging) has very little effect.

So, why does aerobic exercise deliver such small returns?

The most fundamental aspect of any fat loss program is to create a calorie deficit — to burn more calories than you eat. Unfortunately, you just don’t burn that many calories with a typical aerobic exercise program.

One pound of fat contains the equivalent of roughly 3,500 calories. So, assuming your calorie intake remained static and your weight was stable, you’d need to burn an extra 500 calories per day to drop just one pound of fat over the course of a week. To lose fat at a decent rate (around two pounds per week) you’d need to burn 1000 extra calories per day. And the type of workout that burns 1000 calories, in terms of both time and effort, is not a realistic goal for most people.

For aerobic exercise to be effective, you need to do a lot of it. Scientists from Canada, for example, report that a walking program was enough to cut body fat levels by an average of 13 pounds over three months, or just over one pound per week [6]. Although this is a lot more than some of the other studies we’ve looked at it, the people taking part in this trial trained for more than one hour, every single day. And not everyone has that much spare time to devote to exercise.

And that brings us to another problem.

Most modern exercise machines have digital readouts telling you how many calories you’ve burned. Unfortunately, these digital readouts can’t always be trusted.

The most reliable way to assess energy expenditure during exercise is to measure oxygen consumption. Each liter of oxygen that you consume generates approximately five calories of energy. For example, if you exercise for 30 minutes and consume 30 liters of oxygen, you’ll have burned 150 calories. But without directly measuring oxygen consumption, it’s difficult to get an accurate estimate of how many calories you’ve really burned.

Another factor that affects the reliability of calorie counters is the difference between net and gross calorie expenditure. Gross energy expenditure refers to the number of calories you burn during exercise plus your metabolic rate. Net energy expenditure refers to just the number of calories you burn during exercise. Because calorie counters on some exercise machines display gross energy expenditure, the figures they give can be misleading.

In one study, the gross number of calories burned during each workout was estimated to be 255 calories [9]. But the net figure (remember, the net figure represents the “real” number of extra calories you’ve burned) was just 187 calories.

In other words, if you rely on the numbers given by the calorie counters, it might appear that you’ve burned more calories than you really have.

The bottom line

Although it comes as a surprise to many, the majority of research shows that aerobic exercise in the so-called “fat burning zone” is not a very effective way to lose fat.

That’s not to say that cardio is a waste of time. Interval training, or the type of high-intensity cardio recommended by Tom Venuto, is another story entirely.

But in most cases, 30 to 40 minutes of moderate-intensity cardio three or four times a week isn’t going to deliver the results you want. A full-body training program that includes both cardiovascular and resistance exercise, combined with a proper diet, is a far more effective way to drop the pounds

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