Cardio or strength training: why cardio alone is not enough

Endurance work improves how well your heart and lungs supply oxygen to working muscle. That is a real health benefit, independent of appearance, and the reason this is never about dropping cardio.

It also spends energy during the effort, which helps create the deficit a fat loss phase requires. On that specific point, cardio does the job.

When you lose weight, you do not only lose fat. Part of the loss comes from lean mass, muscle included, unless something explicitly tells the body that this muscle is worth keeping.

That signal is mechanical tension: lifting, pushing or pulling something heavy enough. Low-intensity cardio does not send it. The result is a lighter version of the same body, with the same proportion of fat, which the scale does not show.

This is why body composition, the ratio between fat mass and lean mass, describes what people actually want far better than weight alone. BMI, for its part, makes no distinction between the two.

There is no mystery worth stringing out here: the training missing from most of these programmes is resistance training. Barbells, dumbbells, machines, bands or bodyweight: the modality matters less than the demand placed on the muscle.

Its value is not the calories burned during the session; a strength session usually burns fewer than a run of the same duration. Its value is preserving, or building, the tissue that gives the body its shape while fat comes off.

If you have never touched a barbell, the starting point is described in how to start strength training, and movement execution in the exercise library.

You will often read that strength training keeps burning calories for hours. There is indeed an elevated oxygen consumption after an intense effort, while the body returns to its resting state. The phenomenon is real.

It is, however, heavily overstated in popular articles: its magnitude is modest and does not justify a programme on its own. The real benefit of strength training is not that post-session burn, it is the muscle you keep.

I would rather say so plainly than sell a mechanism that would not hold up on your scale.

This is the most widespread fear among women hesitating to start. Building muscle is a slow process that requires years of structured training and matching nutrition, and the female hormonal profile makes it markedly more gradual.

What most women mean by “toning” is exactly what resistance training produces: maintained muscle under a reduced layer of fat.

Strength work first in the week, cardio around it. Two to three resistance sessions, with endurance placed on the remaining days or after the strength portion rather than before it, so you do not arrive tired on the technical lifts.

The exact dosage depends on your starting point, your available time and your goal. It is the first trade-off we make together on a discovery call, or in the group sessions if you prefer training with others.