There is a great deal of confusion surrounding body composition improvement. Conflicting
information saturates the media concerning what methodology is most appropriate to help us
reach our goals, which leads to many of us expending unnecessary time and energy in the gym
doing the wrong things. Approaching our goals from the wrong direction, unfortunately, keeps
them out of reach.
First, we need to get a few things straight. Body composition is the comparison of adipose tissue
(fat) to lean tissue (everything else). Those of us who desire to shape, tone, and define our bodies
often mistakenly identify our primary goal as simply “weight loss”. In reality, our goal is more
accurately described as “body composition improvement”. Losing weight alone will not produce
the result we strive for. We also need structure – in the form of lean muscle.
To put the bottom line up front: Lifting weights (resistance training) is a better way to improve
body composition than cardiovascular exercise. Disagree? Read on…
There are two main reasons resistance training is so effective – one occurs in the short-term, one in
the long-term.
The short-term can seem a little tricky, and is often misinterpreted. While you are actively
exercising, cardiovascular exercise burns more calories than resistance training of the same
relative intensity. This fact alone causes a great deal of confusion and feeds misinformation to popular fitness media.
There is more to the story than how many calories we burn during a workout. How many calories are expended post workout
is relevant as well. When our cardiovascular routine ends, it takes the body merely a few minutes to return to resting heart rate, and therefore resting metabolism. However, when we finish resistance training, our metabolism is positively affected by tissue repair and
growth for up to 72 hours. When we finish with cardiovascular exercise, our metabolism returns to
normal before we hit the locker room, while after a resistance training workout we continue
burning extra calories for several days. Still not convinced? Consider the long-term.
The long-term picture is a little simpler. Resistance training over time will cause the body to
create additional lean muscle mass. Lean muscle is more metabolically active, that is, it requires
more calories to maintain itself than adipose tissue does – so the more lean muscle mass we have,
the higher our metabolism. Elevating our metabolism causes the body to burn more calories
during everything that we do, day and night.
Restated simply: Resistance training is a more effective way to improve body composition than
cardiovascular activity, both in the short-term and the long-term. Cardiovascular training is still
critical for good health – the heart is the most important muscle, after all. But we call it “cardio” for
a reason: it is primarily for the heart. The road to train the rest of the body runs straight through
the weight room.
So stop worrying about weight, step off the scale, and pick up some dumbbells.
