Weight for it

Many people out there, past me included, spend an inordinate amount of our workout time doing cardiovascular exercise. While it is very important to work that heart muscle (the cardio) and I can’t argue with the caloric spend being higher for cardio than for other forms of exercise, as I have grown wiser in my age, it is pretty clear weight training is your better option for maintaining fitness.

I offer a couple of irrefutable facts that support this conclusion– with a couple of opinions as well.

1. Fact: Weight training doesn’t spike our cortisol, and that is a good thing. Our biological response to prolonged activity which increases stress on our nervous system is to create cortisol– our body senses that we are expending a much higher amount of energy than normal, and starts to figure out how to replenish that energy. As cortisol increases so does blood sugar which increases insulin production. Both of these can cause weight gain, elevate your appetite and slow your ability to metabolize (burn) calories. This is the definition of what you are doing in most cardio activities, long periods of steady increased effort, increasing your cortisol. Weight training avoids this as the stress is both contained to short bursts of effort followed by rest, and should be, shorter in overall duration (arguably more anything above 60 minutes in the gym is not really effective.) Weight training doesn’t elevate our cortisol and allows us to torch the calories we want without making us hungry.

2. Fact: Muscle is more dense than fat. Reality check: a pound of feathers and a pound of gold weigh the same but it is safe to say I would prefer to have the gold (not just for the intrinsic value) but the size is going to be significantly smaller as gold is more dense than feathers and harder to carry around. The same goes for muscle vs fat. For the same weight, muscle takes up almost 20% less space. That may not seem like a lot but If your waist is currently at 40 inches, reducing that by 20% takes 8 inches off, that’s significant. This ignores important things like bones and organs so not going to be the directly equivalent to this ratio, but reducing 20% of the volume of your body by swapping fat for muscle would drastically change the way you look– without losing a pound of weight.

3. Fact: Muscles burn more calories. We all burn calories just by simply existing. Each of us has our deadbeat rate of burning calories even if we are just lying in bed all day. It’s called the basic metabolic rate or BMR. Regardless of what we do, BMR means we will burn calories as our heart pumps blood out to our body and we sit there, breath and scroll. However, the fat part of our body is, predictably, lazy and low maintenance; it exists happily burning 2-3 calories a day per pound, a low-ambition bodily grifter trying to stay under the radar. Muscle, is the opposite, it’s like our inner ADHD child, attention and resources hungry as it neurotically burns 7-10 calories a day per pound. One hundred pounds of muscle demands 1,000 calories of nutrition a day, one hundred pounds of fat tepidly asks for only 300 calories. It you have pounds to shed, build up your muscles which will then burn the extra calories with no additional effort at all.

4. Fact: Muscle building supports a skeletal and joint health. Cardio activities exert significant stress on joints and bones as the repetitive impact of each stride can cause stress fractures, tendonitis and osteoarthritis. These risks are greatly multiplied for people who are overweight meaning that intense cardio for weight loss can actually endanger ones overall health. Contrast that with using your muscles to contract against resistance, such as through weight training, it will pull on the bones, stimulating bone remodeling and increasing bone density which reduces the risk of fracture and helps prevent osteoporosis. Additionally, weight training improves joint stability by strengthening the muscles and connective tissues surrounding joints, building up the support around these to help avoid injury. There is a reason that the training protocol for advanced athletes in every every kind of sport include strength training– it’s not just so they can look good on the cover of Sports Illustrated, it helps them perform better and keeps them safer. While your days of tackle football may be over over (or never started), life is a contact sport and you don’t want your next contact to portray to the world that you fragile and weak. There is a reason that people made millions on selling a system which was solely set up to call someone and tell them ‘I’ve fallen and I can’t get up’– don’t be that person– get up on your own.

Opinion: Personal preferences here but I’m going to go out on a limb and just say, muscles look better. This is not about body shaming, but generally fat rolls look good on babies and bulldogs, and skinny evokes thoughts of malnourishment or methamphetamines. When I sent my first pictures to my online coach a few years ago and he called me ‘skinny fat’ it was disheartening on all levels. I think Eliud Kipchoge is an amazing athlete and has done amazing things in the marathon, but he looks like he is two meals away from starvation. Contrast that with Usain Bolt with his chiseled athletic look — both runners, both fit but one of them obviously hits the weights on a regular basis and the look is amazing. While you can use diet and cardio yourself into or out of being fat or skinny, you can’t build muscles without weight training.

Opinion informed by facts: Cardio and weight training are both great for mental health. Both will boost levels of serotonin (long-term well being) as well as dopamine (short-term pleasure). In addition weight lifting can also boost testosterone production after workout which enhances self-confidence. Weight lifting edges out cardio for me in terms of the mental health impact. After a long cardio session where I have worked hard, while if definitely get the hit of dopamine, I also feel exhausted and ready for a nap. After a productive workout session in the gym; one where I have gone to failure and gotten ‘the pump’ feeling of blood rushing to my muscles, I feel like the king of the world. In addition, obvious narcissism aside, there is a reason that people take gym selfies at the end of a weightlifting workout and post these to social media. Even if the improvements are fairly marginal–you feel like you look amazing. Contrast that to the feeling after a long stretch of cardio; the last thing I want to do is capture my sweaty, swollen appearance on film as I lie there trying to return to a normal heart rate.

Cardio has its place in any exercise plan, and the above distinctions are typically based on excessive, repetitive cardio at the expense of muscle development. I don’t argue abandoning it (and in another post will go into more detail of why cardio) I just suggest that weightlifting should be the bigger focus. It’s akin to choosing a major in college; if you’re younger, you should at least minor in weightlifting — and if you’re returning to school later in life, weightlifting should almost certainly be your major.