Should you Replace Your Cardio with Strength Training?

Should you Replace Your Cardio with Strength Training? A few years ago cardio was king for fat and weight loss until researchers discovered that it was resistance training which offered superior fitness then regular steady state sweat sessions with cardio. What most people do not know is that cardio like a forty-minute jog to burn calories.

While on the other hand strength workouts help you build your muscle and burn calories even after you are done working out and lounging around. This is because like all other muscles heart is one too, and strength training strengthens your heart.

If you have hit the gym to become a healthier version of you, then the best option is to put on a waist shaper and get started with strength training. A lot of health experts even recommend that on days at the gym when you can only do a single thing, focus on lifting weights. Weight training should be an essential component of a healthy daily routine.

All that being said, you should not leave cardio behind. It comes with a plethora of advantages for the human body.

Why Cardio Works?

Plenty of health benefits can be experienced when you start running, swimming or cycling. The training session particularly targets your heart and lungs which have to work faster and harder than they do when you are doing strength training. If your goal is to improve your cardio-metabolic health, cardio is the way to go.

And that is not it. If your workout goal is to lose a few dress sizes a combination of cardio and strength training can get you the best result instead of performing strength training in isolation. This is how it works, cardio gives you the calorie burn you need when mixed with a healthy diet to make your body go into a calorie deficit. At the same time, strength training gives you more muscle and a much better metabolic rate which helps sculpt the body even more.

When you boost your muscles capillary and mitochondrial density, it is cardio workouts which enhance the body’s function to offer the muscles more energy and an improved performance during regular workouts. It is the capillaries that carry nutrients towards your muscles and cleanse the body of waste such as carbon dioxide and it is the mitochondria which play the role of your muscle cells power plants. With better performance come better results.

On top of this, every time you are done with a resistance training set, your heart, and lungs which largely are strengthened between cardio workouts are also responsible for helping the body go into recovery mode for optimal benefits. They work by giving the body energy, oxygen, and amino acids which help replenish it.

Finding the Correct Balance of Both Strength Training and Cardio

With the busy lives and the dependency of sitting indoors on a desk through a nine-to-five job, most of us need more cardio in our daily lives. Our bodies sadly don’t even experience the bare minimum exercise they need. This does not mean a full blown out workout. Even a ten-minute brisk walk or talking the stairs instead of the elevators qualifies as well. Even the American Heart Association urges that people perform 150 minutes of cardio in a week at least. At the same time, this could range from 20 to 60 minutes a day.

The truth is that there is no perfect balance of cardio and strength training that works for everyone. What you should do more of depends majorly on your current state of health and your personal fitness goals. For example, if you are passionate to do a triathlon, your workout regime would differ greatly from someone who wants to gain muscle mass and become a bodybuilder. Both are equally strenuous and yet both will require a different diet and different routines. This is the part where you must consult not just your dietician but also your primary care physician.

Other than those, for every other person who wants to work out to keep in shape or just be healthy you should stick to exercises that you enjoy, this is because you are probably going to struggle with sticking your diet and dragging yourself to the gym amidst a busy schedule every day. If you enjoy it, you will attempt to make it part of your day and it will feel rewarding. You could try mixing your spin class with your workout or apart from your strength training make one favorite sport a part of your exercises like swimming or volleyball. If you want to keep things simple yet effective running during every workout regime works too while using strength training for injury prevention helps you with recovery and improves running performance too which sustains your stamina.

Whatever you like as your cardio routine make sure that it makes up at least 10 minutes of your workout regime. It would be a mistake to switch to strength training entirely when you can gain more benefits with a combination of both.

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