Before we begin to answer that question, it's important to lay down the science so you can have a full understanding of how exercise, more specifically, different types of exercise, influence your body’s energy usage. 

You’ve probably heard the term energy in vs energy out. If our energy intake is greater than what we use, we gain weight, if it’s equal, we maintain our weight and if it’s less than, we lose weight. The misconception here is that energy output purely relates to physical activity. 

Energy output has the following three components: 

• Basal metabolic rate

- This is the energy you would burn if you purely lay down all day and did absolutely nothing. It’s that needed to keep your heart beating, your lungs expanding and contracting, a baseline level of brain activity, and repair and replacement of your cells and tissues. Hold in mind that last point, we’ll come back to that later! 

• Thermogenic effect of food

- This is a surprising but very true phenomenon that eating food, in fact, burns calories. When we eat, some energy that we take in from food is used in the process of food digestion. The mechanical movement of the stomach and intestines and some chemical reactions in food breakdown all require energy in themselves. 

• Activity levels

- This is any additional, voluntary movement that increases our energy expenditure. This can be anything from using your hand muscles to write, walking up the stairs, to working out. All these activities increase the amount of energy we require than should we purely do nothing. Aka these activities increase our energy expenditure beyond that of our basal metabolic rate. 

Now we will relate all this to exercise! When we put additional stress on our muscles through exercise we create what is known as microtears in our muscle fibres. This is a form of cellular damage.

Purely cardio-based exercises like running, the cross-trainer, swimming, cycling or others that have little muscular resistance, do increase our energy output, however, do not cause the same quantification of microtears as resistance training does. 

When we stop exercising these microtears need to be repaired through anabolic reactions (to mean building up rather than breaking down) taking place in our body’s cells. These anabolic reactions require energy, and so repairing the microtears increases our basal metabolic rate. In other words, the energy burn of resistance training continues even when the workout has finished. And this is why one outcome of resistance training may be weight loss, more so than cardio-based exercises.