Running is less futile than resistance

No doubt the Christmas and New Year period has seen you sitting down to a few festive tables. While life has moved on and you may be either back at work or at least thinking about being back at work, the memory of those culinary indulgences lingers on in the form of an extra kilo or two and pants that are just a touch tighter. So while maintaining a healthy weight is a perennial concern, at this time of year losing weight is especially top of mind. To help you lose that weight a new study has shown that aerobic exercise is more effective than pumping iron.

The study involved overweight or obese adults being allocated to one of three exercise groups. One group undertook resistance training that involved three days per week of weight lifting doing three sets per day and 8-12 repetitions per set. A second group undertook aerobic training by running around 20 kilometres per week. In all the aerobic group spent an average of 133 minutes per week exercising while the resistance group spent an average of 180 minutes. A third group combined the aerobic training and the resistance training.

The results showed that aerobic training led to more weight loss than resistance training. This was partly due to an increase in lean body mass (muscle) from the resistance training. However, this did not account for the full effect. The aerobic exercise group lost significantly more fat than the resistance training group. Also, the group that combined both aerobic and resistance training did not have significantly greater reductions in body fat or body mass than the aerobic training alone.

Resistance training offers many health benefits and especially beneficial as you age so while you could not say that resistance (training) is futile, it certainly doesn’t do for your weight what aerobic training can.