Aerobic Exercise Vs Resistance Training Which Is Better?

October 10, 2009 By Mark

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So we may be a person who hasn’t exercised for a long time, and maybe slightly overweight with eating the wrong foods etc. Now we need to start doing something about it so which type of exercise will give us more bang for its buck.

Is it aerobic exercise or resistance training? Which really is the better of the two? And does it make a difference whether you do one or the other or a combination of both. Along the way somewhere, we should find out the answers.

Sometimes it can be a bit of a dilemma knowing which is best for you, the problem is you can often get overloaded with information from various different sources, media outlets etc saying different things so it can be hard to know what to do.

Many lay person in the healthcare industry say that aerobic exercise is more than sufficient for any one particular person. So what is the overall difference of doing other types of exercise like resistance training.

No matter what, as long as you are doing some kind of exercise that is the most important factor, as far overall things are concerned. Exercise is a key component when you’re trying to lose weight, it may be slighty harder to lose it quicker if you are relying on a calorie deficit alone.

Research which has been conducted in the past revolving around these particular elements has very often being very inconclusive, the reason for this is there can be so many factors to take into consideration. Like dietary habits amount of times the person exercises, how much intensity they put into it and what type of foods they eat consistently.

Whether or not they exercise regularly or not. When studies have been done in the past regarding weight loss and exercise these particular variables haven’t been taken into account, so this can tend to lead to misleading results.

Dietary habits were not scrutinised enough in studies done in the past, where participants were doing various types of exercise. For instance aerobic exercise and resistance training, or resistance training on its own or aerobic exercise.

There were two studies done which we can use as case studies to see exactly what happened.

Someone called Kramer and his associates did a study to see what difference there were between various exercises and combinations of them. They monitored people who dieted for three months, who dieted and did aerobic exercise, and dieted and did a combination of resistance training and aerobic exercise.

Their calorie intake was 1200 calories per day, the people in the group who dieted and did aerobic exercise, did approximately 30 to 50 minutes of supervised exercise and they trained at a rate of 70 to 80 percent. In addition, those who did aerobic exercise and resistance training did the following.

After having a break later on that day they did 11 types of different resistant training exercises, working from quite intense rules. And here are the results of the first study.

Throughout the three groups all of the participants lost weight and reasonable amounts of body fat, now this is where it gets quite interesting there was no significant difference between all three groups.

Which to conventional wisdom is quite surprising, it was found that there was no significant change as far as fat loss was concerned. In fact some studies have found that if people can manage to have a 500 calorie deficit from food alone they can actually lose weight, without needing to do any exercise.

This can be achieved if you use a system something called intermittent fasting and a calorie reduction, I have wrote about this in the past.

So let’s see what study number two uncovered someone known as Ballor and his colleagues conducted their own research. They monitored people whom had lost weight already and for a period of three months monitored two groups, one group did resistance training while the other did aerobic exercise.

One group exercised at 50 percent capacity for 60 minutes in intervals of three times per week doing aerobic exercise, and the second group did progressive resistance training. The resistance-training group had no further weight loss. Now don’t forget one of the criteria of this from the beginning was that they had lost weight already.

So what this is trying to say, its to emphasise the fact that if you are doing resistance training and you have lost weight already, you might not notice any difference if you are doing it progressively as they where. The aerobic group however lost an additional 2 1/2 kilograms.

There were no different measurements in resting metabolic rate, although in the weight training group there was an upward trend in what is called the absolute resting metabolic rate.

So between the two both resistance and aerobic exercise, when you’re doing it three times a week for one hour per day the differences between the two can be marginal.

This is probably due to the fact of the high calorie deficit that most studies impose when monitoring people. So when the calorie deficit is lower through diet alone, then the exercise will have a greater impact in keeping weight off.

So in conclusion there can be many factors as to why you may not necessarily be losing weight by what you are doing.

If you are still eating more than you should be and exercising. You may just hit a plateau, if you exercise throughout the week and generally move around more you will probably have more effect overall.

The thing is these days, we do our three or four hours a week and think it is sufficient, but that seems to be the standard that’s laid down by health professionals as to how much we need to do. So what can we take away from this, well any exercise is better than none. But why not combine it more into your everyday life.

Here is how: