“If you’re a serious person who wants to tone your body, cardio is a waste of time.“ Wise words spoken by the late Leroy Colbert. Many people often focus on cardio, short for cardiovascular, thinking that it’s the most efficient way to lose excess weight, become toned, and/or become healthier.
The fact is that weight training, or weight lifting, is a far more efficient way to tone, strengthen, and maintain a long term, positive body composition.
The notion that “cardio” is the best way to lose weight has pervaded gyms and exercise circles for years. Cardio is a massive waste of time when it comes to fat loss. It’s a really poor, time consuming tool.
An hour’s worth of jogging or cycling on average barely burns 500 calories. Even high intensity aerobics for an hour only just surpasses 500 calories on average. Weight training, however, is superior to cardio and does much more than just burn calories. The purpose of this post isn’t to knock those who do cardio, but to highlight ‘a better mouse trap.’
Weight training benefits include improving bone density, the heart muscle becomes stronger and healthier, more calories are burned because of an increase in muscle mass, improved posture, reduced back pain, the list goes on… Always view weight training, with proper dietary supplementation, as a lifestyle.
Many times we get so preoccupied with losing weight that we make goals to lose a certain amount then when we reach that goal we tend to ‘slack off’ and gain all of the extra weight back again.
Make weight training your primary method of exercise, it will always give far superior benefits than if one decides to do cardio, cardio, cardio.
What type of weight training one may ask? In my post, ‘what exercises should I do when I join a gym’?, I list compound exercises(compound movements) that are universally beneficial. Video examples of the recommended exercises are in my post, ‘short video clips’.
If one enjoys doing cardio, then continue to do so, BUT weight training is, by far, a more beneficial type of exercise eliciting better, long term results.
“As I said before, when it comes to basic lifting and weights and training, nobody can tell me anything. Now you’ve got all kinds of different exercises, the jumps and the whips and all that kind of stuff. I’m not into that! I’m into steady barbell training….all this other stuff is short term, jumping in the air, flipping and flying,…there’s no longevity in it.” Leroy Colbert
