Lift it or Lose it?

I have heard a lot of women claim that the best way to lose weight efficiently is to start losing fat first, through lots and lots of cardio, then add in the resistance training.  Well this is a big fat fallacy, and I’m going to tell you why.  Weight training is an essential and indispensable part of any weight loss and yes, fat loss program.  You’d be crazy to leave it out.  Why go into battle with one weapon when you have two at your disposal.

    As adamant as I am about this issue, I can understand why women are tempted to buy into this myth.  The theory is that building muscle isn’t going to do you any good until you remove the fat over it.  The muscle, they say, won’t even show if you have layers of ugly fat over it.  Well sure, muscle will look more defined if you lose more fat, but leaving weight training out of your routine isn’t really the solution.  Cardio burns a lot of calories very quickly, and a session of cardio training will burn more calories than most resistance training workouts.  This being the case, it makes sense to focus on cardio if you want to burn off fat, right?  Wrong.  While cardio will give you a calorie blast, the muscle you build while weight training will increase your ability to burn more calories throughout the day.  Weight training can even help you burn calories while you sleep. 

    Now to this issue of aesthetics.  You can’t look ripped if you still have lots of fat on your body, it’s true.  But, weight training can help you look thinner much faster than you would by doing cardio alone.  Weight training gives shape, even to your remaining fat, by tightening and sculpting the muscles underneath.  When I give equal time to weight training, I always start to hear compliments on my weight loss efforts sooner than I do when I slack off on the weight training.  Then, when you do start to lose the fat, the good-looking muscle will already be there underneath, and you won’t have to start a whole new program to tone up. 

    Cardio training and resistance training are like the two halves of the Yin and Yang symbol.  Without both parts, your program is not complete.  Cardio blasts extra calories, builds endurance, and benefits your heart.  Weight training tones, improves performance, protects your back and joints, and increases your metabolism.  We all want to find the quickest shortcuts to our goals, but sometimes what seems to provide the fastest results in the short-run hampers our ability to make it to the finish line.