#FindFit – Which Is Better: Aerobics or Strength? Tackling the Controversial Debate of Cardio

After decades of personal training, coaching, consulting, speaking, and basically just “putting out” health and fitness-related content, there’s one question one personal trainer has been asked over and over throughout the years, and there’s a good chance you’ve wondered it yourself: which is better, cardio or resistance training?

Now, this question is pretty controversial and admittedly quite dogmatic, and practically everyone with any inkling of a “fitness background” has a different (often conflicting) opinion on the matter. In fact, spend enough time searching #fitspo on Instagram, and you’ll see everything from:

“Fasted cardio is the best way to lose weight”…

…to “doing cardio is a waste of time”…

…and even “resistance training only makes you bulky and causes injuries.”

So, if you’ve been looking for a definitive answer to the question of “should I do cardio or resistance training?” look no further, as I’m finally tackling it once and for all in this article (hint: the answer is not as black-and-white as many fitness experts make it out to be).

The Key to Success: Evaluate Your Goals

One of the key first steps when deciding which exercise modality is best for you is to step back and look at your own personal goals and intentions. This is the important step that most people miss when attempting to answer any question about health and fitness.

In fact, before making any lifestyle modification you should first look at your “why” under a microscope and really consider specifically what you want to accomplish, why you want to accomplish that, and how you are going to get there in the most efficient and effective way possible–and this will look different for each and every person.

Here are a few examples of how different goals require a completely different training approach.

Many people that I work with will tell me that they want to “lose weight.” However, usually what they really mean is that they want to lose fat AND gain or maintain muscle mass. Basic weight loss with no focus on body composition can be achieved through simply burning off more energy than you consume (being in a caloric deficit) via diet, exercise, or both. However, weight loss in combination with losing fat and gaining muscle requires a careful balance of energy-burning with stimulation of the muscles in order to remain in a caloric deficit, while also sending the correct signal to your muscles to grow. So, if your goal is the latter, the type of exercise you choose matters greatly!

Others may have goals of gaining muscle mass, also known as muscle hypertrophy, without a specific focus on body fat percentage. Hypertrophy is accomplished through “progressive overload” training, which continually increases the signal to your muscles telling them to grow consistently. Unlike the goal of losing fat and gaining muscle, purely increasing muscle often requires you to be in a caloric surplus to maintain an anabolic (muscle-building) state.

Another example is Olympic lifters and powerlifters who are specifically seeking an increase in the strength of their muscles. This increase in muscular strength (which often comes with an increase in size) is going to require a different training approach than the previous example of those simply looking for the appearance of larger muscles.

The personal trainer has also worked with many endurance athletes, such as distance runners, Ironman competitors, and professional athletes. These folks typically have a goal of improving endurance, which requires a different approach focused on creating an increase in cardiovascular capacity. Optimizing endurance typically requires a gradual increase in exposure to training that challenges the cardiovascular system. This gradual increase will condition the cardiovascular system to better tolerate long endurance events and allow someone to perform better.

And finally, some people, such as figure competitors or those that just want to look good naked may be seeking a very specific body composition, often referred to as “toned” or “sculpted.” Achieving this goal can be different depending on what each person is looking for or what type of competition they are involved in, and the methods are just as variable!

So as you can see, just based on taking a step back to assess one’s goals, answering the question of whether cardio or resistance training is “better” becomes quite complicated!