It’s Time to Rethink Your Approach Why Resistance Training Should Be at The Core of Your Exercise Programme

It's Time to Rethink Your Approach: Why Resistance Training Should Be at The Core of Your Exercise Programme

How often have you heard that cardio is the best way to get in shape and improve your health? It’s the exercise most doctors recommend and what society deems as “real” exercise. But have you ever stopped to question if it’s really the only or even the best option?

Let’s have a thoughtful discussion about exercise and what may be the most effective modality. My goal isn’t to discredit any form of activity but rather to ensure you have all the information to make an informed choice.

While strength training is commonly associated with muscle gains and aesthetics, it is just as vital for sustainable weight loss and health optimization.

First, let’s start by acknowledging cardio does offer great value and is a necessary component of a well-rounded fitness programme. So, let’s be clear, maintaining a base level of aerobic fitness is important for overall health and it is an important component of my exercise programme. However, despite the popularity of steady-state cardio exercise, it has failed to deliver the weight loss and health improvements that were expected. Doctors suggest cardio because that’s what studies of the past exclusively looked at when examining exercise and health outcomes. However, those studies failed to consider resistance training, which works through different mechanisms. Only recently have scientists begun exploring its benefits, and the results have been eye-opening.

So where did we go wrong with conventional fitness wisdom? And what actually does work for transforming the body and optimizing wellness? Read on as we challenge the common misconceptions around exercise and bring light to why a resistance training-centric approach could be the most efficient and effective exercise strategy for optimizing body composition, health and longevity.

The Failure of Conventional Fitness Approaches

For the last 50 years, continuous cardiovascular exercise such as jogging, cycling and elliptical training has been touted as the gold standard for health and fitness. The typical recommendations call for 150 minutes per week of moderate-intensity cardio like brisk walking or 30-60 minutes most days of more vigorous cardio like running or spin classes. While this type of cardio has its place in a well-rounded fitness program, it has failed to deliver the drastic improvements in population health that were expected.

Despite the proliferation of elliptical machines, treadmills, spin studios and cardio classes, rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and other chronic illnesses continue to climb. The decades-long obsession with steady-state cardio exercise for weight loss has been ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst for many individuals. Have you noticed that the more cardio you do, the less effect it seems to have?

Studies show our bodies adapt to steady-state cardio by becoming more metabolically efficient. This means you burn fewer calories doing the same workout over time as your body learns how to conserve energy. This means, that while cardio can help you lose weight, it could fail at helping you maintain it.

Additionally, cardio-focused weight loss programs that don’t include a resistance training component may result in a significant amount of the weight loss coming from muscle and in some cases even bone tissue. This loss of metabolically active muscle mass then suppresses your daily calorie burn because you have less muscle to support. Loss of bone tissue increases frailty and fracture risk, especially as you age.

Conventional fitness wisdom has warned people away from using resistance training for health and weight management purposes. Misconceptions still abound that lifting weights will lead to “getting bulky”, becoming “muscle-bound”, or developing stiff, inflexible muscles. But, a growing body of research indicates that properly designed and implemented resistance training programs provide a powerful solution to our modern health crisis.

Resistance Training for Sustainable Weight Loss

While strength training is commonly associated with muscle gains and aesthetics, it is just as vital for sustainable weight loss and health optimization. Resistance exercise stimulates visceral fat reduction along with enhancing insulin sensitivity, blood lipids, and cardiovascular health markers. The benefits go far beyond physical appearance.

However, the fitness industry has perpetuated the myth that you must do lots of steady-state cardio and suffer through gruelling metabolic conditioning to lose weight and get fit. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. While steady-state cardio burns calories during the actual workout, studies show it adapts your body to require less energy in the long run. This makes it harder to maintain a caloric deficit.

Too much steady-state cardio actually backfires by teaching your body to require less energy both during exercise and at rest. This biological adaptation makes it increasingly difficult to create a sustainable caloric deficit because your metabolism keeps downregulating to compensate. So lots of cardio for fat loss often leads to diminishing returns and plateaus over time.

Remember that the goal of exercise is not to burn calories while you exercise, the goal of exercise is to improve health, get stronger and feel better. If you kill yourself with exercise trying to burn calories, you are going to burn out and make no progress or even regress.

In fact, the vast majority of the calories you burn on a daily basis don’t come from exercise, they come from NEAT (Non-exercise activity Thermogenesis) and that includes:

BMR – the energy your body expends at rest just to keep you alive – The more muscle you have, the higher the calories your body will burn at rest.
Daily movement – walking to work, going up/down the stairs, cleaning, cooking…

Resistance training is optimal for body recomposition and metabolic health due to the corresponding muscle protein synthesis and anabolic hormonal response. Resistance training triggers muscle building which requires extra energy. The more muscle you build, the higher your daily calorie burn. This allows a modest deficit to remain effective without requiring further reductions in calories or massive amounts of cardio. Lifting weights 2-4 times per week in conjunction with a moderate caloric deficit will mobilize fat stores while adding or at least preserving muscle tissue. This is an optimal approach for losing body fat without slowing your metabolism long-term.

For most individuals focused on sustainable weight loss, a resistance training-centric approach works best. The exception would be people with high levels of conditioning who enjoy endurance sports. In that case, maintaining higher cardio volumes is appropriate and resistance training becomes supplemental for strength and joint health. But for the average person seeking improved body composition and health, resistance training should probably be the central piece of their exercise programme. So don’t believe the myth that you must suffer through endless cardio to lose weight!

Optimising Body Composition With Resistance Training

Many individuals avoid lifting weights out for fear they will become “too bulky” or masculine-looking from over-developed muscles. This is a myth, as substantial muscle gains do not occur accidentally without very strategic programming and nutrition. You cannot just “bulk up” a significant amount with resistance training without eating a caloric surplus and training specifically for extreme hypertrophy. Building a significant amount of muscle naturally is difficult (more so as we age and more so for females), it takes a lot of dedication and it doesn’t happen overnight. In fact, most individuals are unable to naturally build the amount of muscle that they would like to so don’t get deceived by the super muscular physiques that you see online (or at the gym). With the exception of a few genetic freaks, most times those bodies have not been built naturally.

If your goals involve improving body composition and health markers, your focus should be on building muscular strength and some lean mass while keeping calories at either maintenance or a modest deficit. Increasing total daily calorie intake substantially to support large muscle gains would be counterproductive to simultaneous fat loss. However, a minor increase of 100-200 calories per day over maintenance levels can assist with recovery and prevent metabolic downregulation.

Patience is also key when beginning resistance training for the first time. Muscle tissue accrual is a slow process compared to cardiovascular fitness gains. Strength gains occur due to neurological improvements at first before muscle fibres physically grow later on. Don’t expect rapid visual changes within the first 2-3 months. But by 6 months you’ll start noticing substantial differences in the mirror.

The Wide-Ranging Benefits of Resistance Training

While steady-state cardio focuses primarily on the heart, lungs and cardiovascular system, resistance training focuses on building lean muscle mass throughout the body. Skeletal muscle is actually the primary driver of metabolism and overall health. Having more metabolically active muscle raises your daily calorie burn, so you can eat more while maintaining your weight and burning fat. More muscle also benefits bone density and balance, which are essential for avoiding injuries from falls as we age.

Muscle mass enhances insulin sensitivity and blood sugar regulation, providing a buffer against diabetes, certain cancers, cardiovascular disease and cognitive decline. Resistance exercise also boosts testosterone and human growth hormone levels, helping regain more youthful hormone profiles that decline with age. This offsets the natural reduction in anabolic hormones like testosterone that accompany ageing.

Furthermore, properly designed resistance training enhances functional flexibility. Full range strength through coordinated, multi-joint movements improves mobility for daily activities and sports performance. This also avoids the risks posed by pursuing flexibility without stability. Have you ever stretched too far and ended up pulling something? I certainly have. Resistance exercise stabilizes the full range of motion, allowing you to exert force and control your body safely through complete joint ranges.

Resistance exercise also triggers substantially greater reductions in unhealthy visceral belly fat compared to steady-state cardio exercise. Visceral fat collects around the organs in the abdominal cavity and is associated with a highly inflammatory state. Too much visceral fat dramatically raises your risk of insulin resistance, cardiovascular disease and metabolic dysfunction. Resistance training directly targets abdominal and trunk fat while cardio tends to decrease subcutaneous fat just under the skin.

Strength training even elevates youthful hormone levels that naturally decline with age, like testosterone and growth hormone.

Starting to see why resistance training should be the foundation of your fitness program whether your goal is overall health and wellness, longevity, or sustainable weight loss?

The Anti-Aging Effects of Resistance Training

While resistance training is commonly associated with muscle gains and aesthetics, it is just as vital for overall health optimization and longevity. Strength training provides benefits far beyond physical appearance and body composition. It is the closest thing we have to an anti-ageing elixir due to its wide-ranging effects on the body and mind.

Resistance exercise stimulates visceral fat reduction while enhancing insulin sensitivity, blood lipid profiles, and cardiovascular health markers. But the benefits go much further. Muscle mass itself has been shown in clinical studies to be protective against all-cause mortality risk. Having more lean mass and full body strength extends lifespan by giving you a physiological reserve to handle physical and mental stressors.

Resistance training is the most effective exercise mode for elevating anabolic hormones like testosterone and growth hormone which decline naturally with aging. It reverses this hormonal decline and restores more youthful hormone levels. This has implications for body composition, metabolism, cognition, libido, and overall vitality. Strength training consistently yields anti-ageing benefits across many body systems.

The impacts of resistance exercise extend to brain health and cognition as well. Studies show strength training enhances episodic memory, executive function, attention span, and working memory versus cardiovascular training. Resistance training even rivals medications and cognitive training for improving some aspects of memory and reasoning in older adults diagnosed with dementia and mild cognitive impairment.

Beyond physical and cognitive elements, resistance training benefits mental health and resilience as well. Strength training reduced symptoms of anxiety by over 50% and lowered depression by 30% in meta-analyses of clinical trials. Lifting weights also boosts confidence, self-esteem and life satisfaction while lowering self-criticism. The benefits to quality of life are just as substantial as the physical changes.

Consistency is key to unlocking the anti-ageing power of resistance training. Committing to 2-4 gym sessions per week for at least 3-6 months will produce considerable benefits. The ideal program combines exercises using free weights, cables and body weights performed with several sets and repetitions. Work major muscle groups 2-3 times per week each for optimal muscle protein synthesis.

While many anti-ageing pursuits like restrictive diets or mega-dosing supplements remain controversial and unsupported, resistance training delivers definitive results. A lifetime of properly executed strength training contributes to both lifespan and health span. Functional strength transcends aesthetic goals by optimizing physiology and mental health. Simply put, appropriate resistance training helps keep the mind sharp and the body resilient so you can live well and longer.

Conclusion

We covered a lot of ground challenging the conventional wisdom that steady-state cardio exercise is the best path to sustainable weight loss, fitness and health. That conventional dogma has simply not been borne out based on research and real-world results. We have also made the case for strength training being key to health, metabolism and longevity and why resistance exercise should be at the core of any fitness program for optimal wellness.

So, are you ready to take control of your body composition, health markers and quality of life by progressively getting stronger over time? What changes do you think strength training could produce in your body and mind if you committed to it consistently?

I hope this article has you reevaluating prejudices against resistance training. My aim isn’t convincing but rather starting a thoughtful dialogue to motivate and inspire you to move forward with an open mind and see what incorporating resistance training into your lifestyle can really do for you in the long run.

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We will be delving into ways to promote muscle health and the benefits of resistance training for overall health and longevity. We will also look at general health guidelines and more.

You may want to check out related articles about Muscle and Resistance Training:

Is that long, slow run, gentle bike ride, or accumulating steps to reap health perks? Or do you need a gut-busting high-intensity cardio to maximise benefits?...

Building muscle requires hard work in the gym, proper nutrition & consistency. But how much protein do you need? does it matter how you spread out your protein?...

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