Weight Training Or Cardio?

A lot of us can be stuck with the decision of whether to pick.. our weights or our cardio? It’s just not always realistic to have enough time for both. This also largely depends on what your goals are..

When it comes to exercising both are beneficial to our overall health and wellbeing. Weight training improves our muscular strength and helps protect our joints from injury. When our body has more muscle mass, we burn more calories at rest. We increase our metabolism when we resistance train and it’s also great to mention the mental health benefits.. working out almost always feels good, at least once its done and over with! Doing cardio improves our endurance and can help cardiovascular health.

So now that we have a little more information, we can see why it depends on our goals. Realistically it would be nice if we all had an hour and a half each workout session to complete our weight training then our cardio after, but that is not always the case. Sometimes we have an hour, sometimes half that, and thats okay! Theres always a way to make it work, what matters most is what you are doing with the time you have. So lets break it down by goals..

If you are working on strength:

You are probably not doing a lot of cardio to start with, and it is probably light walking or some type of HIIT/power based training. You will definitely want to prioritize your weight training if this is your main goal at the moment, however there should be cardio in your weekly routine at least once a wee. Your plan should have a phase in it that includes cardio training at some point. Cardio may not be involved in heavy lifting but it does aid in recovery. Having good cardio will allow you to recover efficiently between sets and breathe comfortably through your heavy lifts.

If you are working on building muscle (hypertrophy):

Similar to the goal of increasing strength you may not have a lot of cardio in your program as it is. You will want to try and do some cardio one time per week or if you don’t have an extra day to do cardio, trying to do a small amount after the workout will be helpful. It will help you recover between sets and have good endurance, as you will be lifting moderately heavy still when focusing on hypertrophy but not as heavy as when focusing on strength. Save your gas tank for your weights still as it should still be your main priority, try to complete your cardio after the workout is done unless it is a 5 minute warm up.

If you are working on losing body fat:

Don’t skip your weight training! If you only have a small amount of time, you can combine the two together. Weight training is still important when you are trying to lose weight, as mentioned before having more muscle mass increases our metabolism. Your body will burn more calories when at rest and when you are doing exercise, so this also means when we do our cardio. Try doing your warm up for 10 minutes instead of 5 to add in an extra little bit each time, and/or try doing circuit training with intervals of weights and cardio mixed together. Weights are still the priority, pick your big main exercises that burn the most calories and pair them with whatever cardio you are doing for 1-2 minutes, you are looking to keep the heart rate up during this type of workout. Do that 3-4 rounds with the cardio included each time.

Hope that helps! For anymore questions feel free to reply to this email..

Happy exercising :)