This question is on everyone’s lips when they want to lose weight is ‘Should I start with cardio or weight training?’ Hearing that cardio will burn more calories than weight training in a shorter amount of time, encourages people to jump on the treadmill and disregard the weights/body weight training altogether. Yes, cardio will burn calories, but weight training has added benefits for your body that you simply can’t achieve with doing cardio alone.
CARDIO
Generally speaking, our bodies need to burn more calories (energy output) than we eat (energy input) in order to lose weight. Cardio is just one form of exercise that can help contribute to this energy output. There are many different types of cardio – the most popular being walking, jogging and cycling. If you want to focus on fat and weight loss, then LISS (Low Intensity Steady State) is perfect. This is because walking burns the most fat per calorie compared to jogging and sprinting. Without going into too much detail, fat requires
oxygen in order to be metabolised (broken down) for energy. The lower the intensity, the more oxygen is available to be used by the body to break down fat.
But there is such a buzz about HIIT training which is high intensity interval training. Short bursts of cardio but intense effort. The advantage of doing high intensity cardio is that you burn much more calories than low intensity cardio and you burn more fat in the same period of time. The advantage of low intensity cardio is that more of the calories that you burn are coming from fat and not other sources.
Regardless of the intensity, cardio is great for increasing fitness levels and building stamina. To start with begin steady and lower in intensity and slowly bring in higher intensity burst when your fitness improves.
WEIGHTS
Through our experience many clients are resistant in lifting weights because they are afraid it will make them appear bulky. This is not true, and is honestly one fitness myth which we wish would go away!
Resistance training will continue to burn calories even after you have completed your workout!
Another great thing about resistance training is that you lose mainly fat, compared to cardio where you can lose a variety of different body masses. Although losing muscle mass will mean your weight on the scale is lower, it probably won’t give you the body you are after. This is
because tone comes from well shaped muscles, and resistance training protects, shapes and maintains those muscles.
As you can see, cardio and resistance training have their advantages, but our answer to
what is best for weight loss? BOTH! If you have a lot of weight to lose, cardio is a great stepping stone for increasing your fitness levels and burning calories quickly. However in order to have that toned, sculpted body that most people desire, you will need to add in some resistance workouts.
So mix up your workouts with a variety of weights and cardio or perform 2 weight sessions with 3 cardio sessions like walking, swimming and cycling.
Join our Func-Fit, Core Fit or Bootcamp classes for a mixture of weights and cardio for a total body workout.