THAT RAISES YET ANOTHER QUESTION: SHOULD LOSING WEIGHT OR EVEN JUST LOSING FAT BE YOUR ONLY GOAL OR YOUR PRIMARY FOCUS?
Weight training: Key to the world?s fittest, leanest, healthiest and most attractive bodies?
I?m not sure what is the background of the authors of this study. Some researchers have done mostly academic work, others have a practical background in strength and conditioning. Here?s mine: I come from the trenches of a personal training and competitive bodybuilding career, with a degree in exercise science and I?ve held many personal trainer and strength coach certifications. So, I?m definitely partial to weight lifting and muscle-building as the best tool for transforming the body. However, I?m not alone in my ?bias??
I?ve been surrounded by other professionals in the fitness trenches my entire life and I don?t know a trainer worth his salt (one who actually transforms other people?s bodies every day) who agrees that aerobic training should be the sole focus of a fat loss program or even that fat loss should be the sole focus of a health and fitness program.
Mind you, I?m not knocking aerobics ? not at all. I?m a big fan of including cardio as one part of the mix. That?s my whole point: It?s practically common knowledge among experienced trainers that better body composition is produced from combining weight training with cardio training.
There is a group of strength coaches and diet gurus today who insist that weight training combined with very strict diet is sufficient to produce fat loss. Surely that is true, but isn?t it also true that most people seem to get better results when adding cardio on top of weight training? Aren?t there ?endomorph? body types where weight training alone doesn?t seem to produce the fat loss/ weight loss results wanted at the rate they are wanted? Didn?t this study seem to bear that out? I can side with the researchers as far as that goes: Weight training alone may not be optimal for fat loss for most people. Put cardio into the mix.
I suppose a good question is how do we prioritize and allocate our time to each activity? Following the same rationale as the researchers ? balancing time commitments with health benefits ? shouldn?t weight training be higher in the hierarchy than aerobics? Given the huge benefit list for weight training (which includes better health), shouldn?t an ideal program start with weight training plus nutrition as the core elements and then add cardio in to increase fat loss and conditioning as needed? That?s how I see it.
For those with real time commitment issues, it?s comforting to know that fat loss really can be achieved just by dialing in the diet (being meticulous about caloric deficit), and that a calorie deficit can be achieved with any choice of exercise. In a perfect world, I?d have you doing all three elements, with that order of priority: Nutrition, weight training and cardio training and adjust the prescription for the two types of training based on your goals and time available.
THE MUSCLE AND METABOLISM ARGUMENT: WAS THIS POINT OVERLOOKED?
Although this study had limitations and subjects had less than stellar results, it did have its strengths and it did raise some good questions. For example, it has been widely believed for years, especially in the bodybuilding world, that if increasing lean mass increases metabolism, then increasing your lean mass will help you lose weight. It has sometimes even been implied or stated directly that you can sit on the couch or sleep and (with your new muscle), you?ll burn more calories and lose more fat from that alone.
The Duke researchers questioned this. They wrote: ?It may be time to seriously reconsider the conventional wisdom that resistance training alone can induce changes in fat mass due to an increase in metabolism.?
It?s well known that an increase in lean body mass leads to an increase in basal metabolic rate. Therefore, for years, we have promoted the idea that gaining lean mass helps with fat loss ? and it does to some degree. However, does it help so much that we can say increasing lean mass, by itself, is a great fat loss strategy? If you only gain a few pounds of lean body mass, the increase in metabolism is nothing to write home about. Without dietary control, it?s no help at all.
It seems to me that the researchers could have made this their primary conclusion. Instead, they said, ?Aerobics is better than weight training for fat loss.? That?s where I think they mixed up their message, because weight training does help with fat loss in the short term, directly and significantly, from increased calorie expenditure. Over the long term it helps too, but maybe not as much as we thought purely from increased basal metabolism.
CONCLUSIONS
Because the research is so inconclusive and opinions always vary due to personal preferences and ideaologies, the weights versus cardio (and what kind of each) debates are likely to continue. But if you consider the entire body of research we have today on improving body composition, combined with the real world experience of the top trainers and athletes who are in the trenches, you can find it very easy to conclude that the optimal method of fat loss is a combination of cardio training and resistance training.
Is more time required to do both resistance and aerobic training? Yes, but with proper program design, time efficiency can be greatly increased. And isn?t it worth doing both, so you can gain ALL the benefits: burning more calories, increasing your strength, gaining lean muscle, decreasing your body fat, improving your health and transforming your entire body shape?
Aerobics helps increase fat loss and you can lose body weight and body fat with aerobics alone. But pumping iron should stay high on your fat loss strategy list. Which of these two ? cardio or weights ? gets the most priority and time from you may depend on your personal goals, but almost everyone can agree that either way, controlling your diet is critical.
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