How many calories do you burn lifting 8 lb dumbbells?

Answer 1

Depends on how many times you lift it. Once doesn't use up enough to matter either way.

You'd have to keep going, continuously, for the better part of an hour to achieve anything.

Weight loss and calorie burn through exercise is mainly about getting and keeping your heart rate up.

And pretty much all kinds of consistent activites, like running, bicycling, swimming, dancing etc etc does a better job of keeping your heart rate up than lifting weights does.

If you can lift weights at a high enough intensity and long enough to match the pulse rate and duration of a run, they you'll burn the same amount of calories.

But odds are you can't.

I can do around 1000 cal/hour during intense cardio, but find it really difficult to get past 600 while doing weight training.

Keep in mind that the big thing is your diet. If you are overeating it's pretty much impossible to exercise hard enough to lose anything that way.

A snack that takes 5 minutes to eat, like a cupcake, can take one hour to burn off.