10 Reasons Why Lifting Is Better Than Cardio

Not all exercises are created equal – and you should know that by now. Regardless of your personal preferences, there are objectively lousy exercises and highly effective exercises, while the majority of moves belongs somewhere in the middle. But can the same be said for training regimes?

Today we’re going to take up the rather challenging task of comparing resistance training against running and cycling and finally deciding who rules them all. Why is that necessary, when both weightlifting and cardio training seem to offer unique health, fat loss and muscle-building benefits? Because first, it will help us debunk some ugly myths about both lifting and cardio routines and set the record straight, and second, we’ll get to describe in detail why resistance training is the second greatest idea in the world after the invention of the wheel.

Yeah, we’re pretty confident about the winner because we’ve done our research. To resolve the strength training vs. cardio conundrum, we’ve dug out tons of scientific evidence and consulted many experts on the subject. In fact, some athletes and training gurus have been recently arguing that the fitness world is ready to ditch cardio altogether. Ouch! We hope that won’t really happen, though.

You can’t get everything from one type of training, and running and cycling have an integral place in a well-rounded fitness program. That’s a solid fact and this article is based on utmost respect for these forms of exercise. However, whenever any truth-lover attempts to isolate the benefits from both strength training and running/cycling and stack them up against each other, strength training emerges as the superior choice. And if you don’t have time for that well-rounded fitness program, it’s much better to grab a barbell than hit the pavement. Here are 10 bullet-proof reasons why.

#1. Running Only Builds Muscle in the Lower Legs

We all know that runners have amazing calves and quads, but that’s usually the end of the story – with the exception of runners with freakish genetics. There’s really no surprise here. Running primarily stresses the ankle joints and the cardiovascular system, and it doesn’t require a big enough range of motion to stimulate significant muscle growth elsewhere.

On a side note, have you noticed that sprinters often rely on strength training to increase their speed and power? That’s because running by itself doesn’t allow them to apply the greatest training stimulus required for maximizing their results – after the beginner phase, the main benefits come in the form of cardiovascular conditioning. But do you know which form of training will help you build (and keep on building!) whole-body muscle strength and mass? That’s right.

#2. Cycling Promotes Bad Posture

Here’s the problem: cycling does nothing to develop the hips or the upper body, which is why many cyclists who have the bragging rights for monster quads suffer from an embarrassing absence of gluteal development. Also, the cycling position is not natural – our spine is designed to have three balanced curves that make up its S-shape. When you’re on a bike, your spine rounds forward from the tailbone to the shoulders and loses its natural shape.

Over time, this can easily lead to a network of health issues and dysfunctionalities, such as lower back disorders, terrible posture and a “pancake butt” comprised of mostly inactive glutes.

#3. It’s All About Strength – and Strength Training Does It Better

Regardless of which physical attribute you worship the most – agility, speed, size, strength, balance – you have to admit that strength is the quality to rule them all. Stronger muscles can do everything better. Orchestrating more powerful jumps? Check. Protecting your joints and connective tissues? Yep. Lifting ridiculous amounts of weight? Absolutely. And as you may already know, nothing builds muscle strength like the progressive overload implemented in strength training.

Becoming stronger will also help you a lot in everyday life. Next time you need to lift something heavy, move some furniture or carry your groceries from the store, you wouldn’t need to call anyone else to help you. Getting stronger also makes you feel more independent – and that’s an amazing feeling. It gives you a sense of achieving something you never thought possible before.

#4. Strength Training Boosts Metabolism More Powerfully

When you increase your muscle mass, you boost your resting metabolism – which makes your body burn more calories. The majority of calories you burn come through the resting metabolic rate – the energy required to keep you alive without any activity. Having more lean muscle mass increases your RMR, and weight training is better at preserving lean body mass compared to aerobic training. The impact weightlifting has on body composition is truly profound: the greater muscle mass a person carries, the more calories they’ll burn while resting. In simple words, muscles boost your metabolism, which results in increased fat loss.

Weightlifting creates a lot of muscle damage that increases post-workout metabolism because it takes energy to repair the muscle fibres you’ve destroyed while training – which equals even more calories burned. And when you lose muscle from doing too much cardio and not enough lifting, your resting metabolic rate drops – which means you’ll burn fewer calories when you’re not in the gym, during the bigger part of the day. In other words, excessive cardio without adequate nutrition will negatively affect your strength and growth due to the stresses put on both the central nervous system and working muscles – and when muscle is lost, so goes your resting metabolic rate with it.

Of course, intensive periods of running or cycling also create muscle damage (mostly to the legs) and spark up your metabolism – but this is dramatically less than what you’d get from a regular resistance training routine. The fact is that any type of high-intensity training is excellent for fat loss because it raises your metabolism and causes you to burn a lot of calories long after the activity is done. That being said, your performance will benefit the most from combining high-intensity workouts with less intense cardio exercises.

One recent study from North Dakota State University found that you can burn 346 calories in just 13 minutes of performing a 6-exercise resistance circuit, while running at a 10-minute mile pace for the same amount of time will only burn 146 calories. Another study showed that 12 minutes of kettlebell swings had the same metabolic impact as running for 12 minutes, but with the added benefits of strengthening many muscles that are neglected when running.

To burn more calories, you need to up both your anaerobic and aerobic energy expenditures, which is best done with high-intensity total-body resistance training. So if you want to rev up your metabolism and lean out as fast as possible, resistance training should be the cornerstone of your program, period.

There’s also the afterburn effect – excess post-training oxygen consumption (EPOC) – the elevated calorie burn in the hours after a session as your body returns to its resting state. Studies show that strength training can keep your metabolism elevated for up to 38 hours after the workout – significantly longer than the afterburn produced by steady-state cardio. After all, larger muscles burn more calories and more fat – and what better way to gain mass than weightlifting? Related: Does Cardio Burn Muscle? The Complete Guide

#5. Strength Training Does Wonders for Mobility

Remember how all strength training articles stress the importance of completing a full range of motion? This is how resistance exercises are correctly performed. A greater range of motion brings many benefits – one of which is improving joint mobility. Neither running nor cycling offer this potential. In fact, they’re generally terrible for people with mobility issues.

You can see the difference by comparing a simple exercise like the lunge with running – lunges will strengthen your hips and thighs, improve hip mobility and fix existing muscle imbalances, while running will only strengthen your leg muscles, especially the calves. Try to compare any classic strength-building exercise with running and you’ll get the same result.

#6. Strength Training Will Reduce Your Risk of Injury

And yet the opposite is not true. As it turns out, running can be a rather dangerous sport – recent research has shown that as many as 79% of runners get injured at least once during the year. Physiotherapists have claimed for ages now that excessive running and cycling can create a multitude of inherent imbalances within the organism, mainly because of the limited range of motion and endless, repetitive movement patterns – which is basically a recipe for overuse injuries.

So how can runners, or anyone else for that matter, protect the health of their joints and connective tissues? By incorporating an adequate amount of strength work into their fitness regime, of course. Besides its ability to strengthen your muscles and tendons, strength training also enables you to fix strength imbalances, improve muscle coordination and prioritize natural, functional movements of the body that can’t be trained with running and cycling.

Research has shown that lack of hip strength and poor development of the core muscles are among the most frequent causes of common running injuries, and recommends that runners perform strength training to identify and improve their weak areas.

#7. Strength Training Builds a Better-Looking Physique

Kind of a no-brainer here. Unless your idea of physical aesthetics is radically different from the one endorsed by most people, you have to agree that, if done properly, strength training can help you build a spectacular physique by maximally developing every muscle in your body – while cycling and running will mostly affect your calves and quads (and possibly weaken your posture).

A high degree of aesthetics is all about the optimal balance between size, proportion, symmetry, and body fat percentage. There are many people with greatly-built bodies out there who haven’t gone through a lot of running, but almost all of them have done strength training for longer periods of time.

This applies equally to women. If you want to get rid of excess fat, become more confident, increase your bone density and look great naked, you must lift weights. Since this type of advice mostly comes from male lifters and bodybuilders, women have a hard time believing that lifting weights will produce the same results in females as it does in males. However, countless female lifters have proven that weightlifting has the same effect on them and produces more or less the same results. It’s been shown that whatever training approach they try, they always get back to weightlifting.

Lots of people try yoga, running or pilates, but do not notice any significant changes in their body composition. The general conclusion is that if you’re running, doing yoga and messing around with light weights occasionally, you won’t experience any drastic fat loss, increased bone density or muscle mass.

Not so long ago, trainers would direct women to the light pink dumbbells, or have them attend the group aerobics class. But nowadays, more women are joining men and lifting weights instead – training harder, pushing themselves, and exercising with better form. When a woman starts realising how physically strong she can become, she can then start finding her inner strength. Confidence has always been an attractive quality, and the confidence they get in the gym starts to show in every aspect of life. A strong woman in the gym is a confident woman outside of it.

There’s also the myth that women should not be lifting weights because they will become too bulky. But the truth is that women don’t have the necessary levels of testosterone to naturally support a bulky body. Additionally, chances are that women who have a massive muscular body are supplementing with various hormones and anabolic steroids – there are some exceptions, of course, but these are rare.

Only a very slight percentage of women have the right genetic potential and the right hormonal environment to sustain a large muscular frame. If gaining muscle was so easy, no one would be complaining about how difficult it was and every lifter would be a hulk. Simply put, even men who have normal levels of testosterone and above average genetics can’t build muscle easily – it takes a tremendous amount of time and effort. Women, mistakenly, start out their fitness journey worried that they’ll get too bulky if they train 2–4 days a week. But they quickly discover that it’s eating too many calories that makes them bulky, not lifting weights.

#8. Strength Training Offers Immense Exercise Variety

“Novelty or training variety are important for stimulating further strength development,” claims a study published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research – and we couldn’t agree more. Variety is the key for breaking or even avoiding the vicious cycle of monotony and loss of motivation, and in combination with progressive overload, it’s what helps lifters keep on making strength and mass gains.

As you’ve probably experienced yourself, cycling and running don’t offer a whole lot in this department – the choice between uphill or downhill running/cycling isn’t exactly what we’d call a wide range of options. On the other hand, there are dozens of ways to do squats, and all of them pack unique benefits. The same can be said for a great number of major upper and lower body exercises.

You can always easily up the challenge and keep your workout interesting by modifying familiar movements and adding little twists to exercises you’ve properly mastered, or you can choose a completely different set of exercises that train the same muscles in a different way. And that’s how you build a complete, healthy and well-defined physique.

#9. Strength Training Helps Slow Down Aging

One recent study showed that strength training in people aged 40 and above can reverse oxidative stress and return no less than 179 genes to their youthful status – and the same cannot be said for cycling or running. Furthermore, this exercise form has been found to directly impact 10 biomarkers of aging in a positive way.

According to S. Melov and M. A. Tarnopolsky, the authors of a 2007 study named “Resistance Exercise Reverses Aging in Human Skeletal Muscle”: “Quite literally, the resistance training was not only slowing, but also reversing the aging process at the gene level. The gene expressions of the resistance trained older subjects demonstrated characteristics similar to those of the younger group. The researchers also noted that mitochondrial impairment, normally seen with inactivity, was reversing with the 6 months of resistance training.”

And what about muscle mass loss and reduced bone density – among the most common negative attributes of aging? Countless studies have shown that resistance training is the best way to preserve muscle mass and bone density and prevent osteoporosis, which is why this type of training is most commonly recommended to older people. By preserving muscle mass, they can maintain a high metabolic rate and avoid a series of health issues such as metabolic disorder, diabetes and hypertension, associated with fat gain – a known side-effect of both aging-associated muscle loss and muscle loss in younger people.

When it comes to bone health specifically: if you’re a woman in your 20s or 30s, chances are you aren’t thinking about developing osteoporosis yet, but you should be. Numerous studies have shown that weightlifting on a regular basis has the potential to increase bone density. All other types of exercise are simply not as effective in terms of keeping your bones healthy and strong. The only effective method to achieve this is to lift heavy loads and put them back down. Take care of this now, so you won’t have to do it later in life. Related: 4 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Skip Leg Day

#10. Strength Training Will Extend Your Lifespan

By now, it’s clear that strength training does a lot more than increasing muscle size and strength. Some researchers have actually claimed that it is the most healthful form of exercise there is – because it protects brain health, prevents sarcopenia, lowers the risk of heart disease, diabetes and cancer, and has been shown to improve outcomes for cancer survivors, just to mention a few. It can also improve hormonal balance and prevent mood disorders, depression and anxiety, as well as enhance cognitive skills in both older and younger people.

But there’s more. Some new studies have found that weightlifting can directly increase your lifespan by lowering the level of myostatin in your body. Myostatin (also known as growth differentiation factor 8, or GDF-8) is a myokine produced and released by myocytes that inhibits myogenesis – the growth and differentiation of muscle cells. The way in which weightlifting increases the size and strength of your muscles is by lowering myostatin. According to some of these studies – primarily in animal models – lower myostatin levels are associated with a lifespan increase of around 15%.

On top of that, if there’s one thing that could keep your self-confidence stable and body image positive during your golden years, it’s having a high degree of strength and mobility – both of which can be maximized and maintained with the help of strength training and weightlifting. This will lower your risk of bone fractures, back pain, osteoarthritis and atherosclerosis. On the other hand, running is a pretty high-impact exercise that isn’t recommendable for most seniors. Cycling could be done forever – but for what purpose? It won’t do anything to develop your upper body and core muscles or improve your posture, stability or balance. It can’t even help you reverse the effects of excess sedentary activity and it’s unable to stimulate effective and dramatic fat loss as strength training can. Running and cycling simply cannot be compared with strength training in any terms, including short-term and long-term health benefits.

The Bottom Line: Combine Both, But Put Lifting First

Do you want to be able to move with ease and vitality, keep your mind sharp and quick, and feel energized and balanced until your very last day? Then make strength training the cornerstone of your fitness program. Period.

Cardio often fails to deliver significant results in people who are trying to lose a lot of weight – but this is not a reason to dismiss it altogether. It brings many benefits: improved heart health, increased metabolism and improved recovery ability. But when it comes to burning as much fat as you can as fast as possible, weight training has proved itself to be far superior. Sprinting is a different story, though – hard sprints can affect your metabolic rate in a similar way to weight training. But they are rather tough and exhausting.

Your performance will benefit the most from combining high-intensity workouts with less intense cardio exercises. The intense parts will boost your metabolism and push your body to burn a ton of fat, while the cardio will speed up the recovery, improve your endurance and increase the efficiency of the whole workout.

Studies have shown that you can achieve great results if you combine strength training and aerobic interval training in the same session – performing weights first while glycogen stores are full, followed by cardio, which then directly taps into fat stores while the elevated heart rate from lifting keeps energy expenditure high.

Multiple studies support the use of weight training alone or in combination with aerobic training for better preservation of muscle mass while shedding body fat. This combination of increased muscle mass and improved metabolic capacity will make you burn more fat in the long term. However, if you simply don’t have enough time to squeeze in some cardio, focus on weight training for optimal results.

For fat loss and body composition change, the main focus should be on full-body training with free weights, with exercises like deadlifts, squats, bench presses, overhead presses, push-ups, walking lunges, pull-ups, bent-over rows, kettlebell swings, farmer’s walks and metabolic conditioning exercises. When using a mix of compound and full-body exercises, you can build muscle and lose fat at the same time.

Everybody knows that if you want the best training results, you must have a sound diet plan. And this is something almost everyone agrees on. The best approach towards having a healthy diet regimen is to decrease nutritional deficiencies, consume the right macronutrients, increase food quality, and pay less attention to meal frequency.

To achieve all of this you need to consume high-quality protein from animal sources, lots of vegetables, healthy carbohydrates and healthy fats from olive oil, nuts and avocados whenever the body needs them. Don’t snack when you’re not hungry, drink lots of water and beverages with minimal calories, and drink a post-workout protein shake coupled with BCAA supplements. Don’t use fad diets – they just limit your ability to pick foods and ultimately lead you to abandon the diet altogether.

But keep in mind that no type of training can make you lose a significant amount of fat on its own – you have to eat right to support your efforts at the gym. The truth is that your diet is responsible for 70% of your success – pair it with some heavy weight training and you’ll get ripped in no time. Related: The 9 Rules of Getting Super Lean

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