Cardio vs Weights for Weight Loss

Cardio vs Weights for Weight Loss

Cardio vs Weights the age old question!

Many of us, especially women, feel that aerobic exercise is the only answer to how to lose weight quickly and efficiently. The problem is that aerobic exercise is not enough by itself. Informed physical trainers and educated health professionals have found through many scientific studies that using a combination of aerobic exercises and resistance training is the key to losing weight and toning muscle mass.

The main problem is that many media outlets have released articles touting that aerobic exercise is the single best way to lose the extra weight that you have been carrying around by using misleading headlines that do not accurately portray the entire story. But, the truth remains that no scientific studies that have been conducted through the proper means of scientific study have concluded that aerobic exercise alone will give you the weight loss or fat reduction that you are looking for.

Many of these media outlets have chosen to conduct their own “studies” that have not been sanctioned by anyone in the scientific community and the exercise programs that were supposedly being studied were not effective exercise programs that would produce lasting results. If you are intentionally setting the study up to be skewed one way or the other because you have not accounted for bias then, of course this is not going to show that these exercise programs will produce results!

One of these supposed studies was released by Dr. John Berardi and was “officially” put out to the public via a link on his Facebook page that referenced an article via Science Daily and was titled “Aerobic Exercise Trumps Resistance Training for Weight and Fat Loss.”

Unfortunately, the release of this article sparked a flood of controversy and tons of outrageous arguments within the health and fitness community because of the claims that were stated within the article without being able to provide concrete evidence that the exercises talked about in the study are effective or not effective. The other reason why this is not a good example of a study is that there was no study of the nutrition of the participants during the course of the study.

So, it didn’t matter to the conductors of the study what was eaten or how many calories were consumed? That makes absolutely no sense because if you are, for example, eating three times the recommended calories per day for your size then you will have to do three times the recommended exercise in order to burn off those excess calories and lose weight.

A good study will monitor calorie intake as well as the exercise regimen of study participants.

Some of these supposed studies only focused on losing weight overall and did not account for possible weight gain due to increased muscle mass from the new exercise plan. When you start exercising or increase your level of exercise, muscle mass starts to form and you naturally gain weight because muscle weighs more than fat. However, gaining muscle is of huge benefit because muscle burns more calories when you are resting. This is known as muscle metabolism.

So when trying to decide which is best for your weight loss regime, try to incorporate a little of both cardio and weight resistance training.

Trust me you body will thank you!