CLEARING THINGS UP: Why Strength Training Matters More Than Cardio
Welcome to the first installment of a short mini-series I’m starting on the blog: Clearing Things Up. One thing that gets me heated in my work (besides women settling for $h!t they don’t deserve) is all the non-sense women believe about what it takes to get in the shape they want.
So I’m attempting to clear some things up, starting with today’s post on: why we should be prioritizing strength training over cardio.
Enjoy! And if there’s something specific you want me to clear up, shoot me a message and I’ll see what I can do. ;)
I’m going to assume the following things are true as I write, since a) this is where most women fall (from my experience as a personal trainer) and b) it would take entirely too long to address all of the variations of body types, goals, beliefs, etc.
You are a woman.
Your physical appearance related goals are to “tone up” but not “get bulky,” aka lose body fat and see some visible muscle.
You associate sweat & difficulty/effort level with a “good” workout
A “good workout” = one in which you burned a lot of calories
You’ve heard/read that strength training (using weights, machines & other resistance devices) is good but you’re not sure why or how to do it and the machines are intimidating plus you feel like cardio is better for weight loss anyway so you just spend a lot of time on the treadmill/elliptical/stairmaster or force yourself to go for a walk or—worse— run.
Any of that feel familiar?
Yep- thought so.
This is about 99% of the women I work with, and also just most of the female population in general.
So let’s clear this up.
First of all, what most women mean when they say they want to look “toned” is that they want to be able to see some definition of their muscles (usually upper arms, thighs & belly.)
They don’t want to “look muscular,” they just want to replace the jiggle with some firmness.
Totally get it.
And also, same, girl.
To do this, though, you need muscle.
If you want to be able to see some muscle, there has to be some muscle there. Period.
Our muscles grow as a response to resistance (i.e. weights.)
Cardio does not provide the resistance our muscles need to grow.*
So…
POINT #1: To ultimately achieve the “toned” look most of us want, we need to have some muscle on our bodies, which will require some element of consistent, progressively increased weight training.
Next up, most women feel like if they didn’t sweat and struggle, it wasn’t a “good” workout. While an effective workout should be challenging, there are a couple things we need to unpack here:
Not every workout (cardio or strength) should be at level 10.
You shouldn’t be pushing your upper limit every. single. time. It’s not good for your body (your central nervous system, muscular-skeletal system, respiratory system, etc) or your mind.
What sane person is going to get excited about working out if every workout feels like death? It’s okay (and still effective) to have workouts that are at a level 6 or 7 difficulty. Stop pushing yourself to ultimate exhaustion and failure or feeling like you didn’t do “enough” if you don’t reach that point.
A “good” workout shouldn’t mean “a workout that burned a lot of calories according to my Apple watch/FitBit.”
A “good” workout should mean an effective workout, and effective ≠ high caloric burn. Effective = efficiently moving us towards our goals, right?
If our goal is to have some visible muscle, the most efficient way to do that is to strategically pair resistance training with some cardio (not: do a ton of cardio in hopes of losing a lot of weight to reveal the little muscle we have already.)
POINT #2: A good workout does mean one in which you burned a lot of calories. A good workout means one that got you closer to your goal(s).
Next up, you keep hearing talk and reading articles about how you should be incorporating strength training into your exercise routine, but you’re not quite sure why.
Saving you some reading-time and science-talk, it boils down to this: strength training is a more efficient calorie-burning tool.
I will ‘splain.
Again, keeping in mind our goal of looking “toned,” part of that process is going to be losing some body fat in order to reveal the muscles underneath. One way body fat is burned is through caloric burn (which is typically why women want to just do a super-hard, high-calorie-burn workout all the time.)
Another way we can burn calories— and an even more efficient way— is through strength training.
I say it’s more efficient not because it’s my opinion, but because it’s a science-backed fact.
Given that doing more in less time = being efficient, that’s exactly why we call strength training “more efficient” compared to cardio.
While you may burn more calories with 30 minutes of good, solid cardio than you will with 30 minutes of resistance training, your caloric burn ends when your cardio ends, while your body will continue to burn calories after your strength training session.
So you’re basically looking at
300 calories in 30 minutes (and you’re done)
vs
150 calories in 30 minutes…….. plus another 100 every hour after that.
(These are made up numbers and times just meant to illustrate the difference in burning calories for a finite period of time vs a prolonged period of time.)
POINT #3: Strength training promotes a longer-lasting caloric burn than cardiovascular training.
Finally, not to totally shit on cardio here: we do need to do cardio!
Not only for our physique goals, but for our general heart and lung health.
However, cardio shouldn’t be your priority if “getting toned” is your ultimate goal.
It should be a part of the plan, yes, but viewed as the icing on the cake vs the cake itself. ;)
Want to get a good idea of where to start in terms of frequency + length of cardio/strength training workout? Shoot me a message and I’ll help you out!
Up next in the “Clearing Things Up” series:
Why dieting/eating low-calorie forever doesn’t work
www.emilyjordan.me/bodyschool
P.S. I’ll be clearing up lotsssss of things like this (and more!) in my online group coaching program, BODYSCHOOL. Applications are ! OPEN ! and class starts mid-June. Learn more here.