Cardio Vs. Strength Training

Question: What is the proper balance of cardio vs. strength training for women? Is there some formula like x minutes of cardio/week and y minutes of strength?

How do you decide whether you should use your precious workout time for cardio or for strength?

Answer: The cardio vs. strength training debate has raged on for years and the reason it’s unlikely to ever be answered decisively is because it’s highly dependant on your individual goals.

With that said most women I speak to want to lose fat and sculpt their bodies so I’ll assume that you’re asking from that perspective.

It’s great that you acknowledge strength training as an important part of your workout program, many women I work with insist on only doing cardio because they “don’t want to get big”.

Despite the fact that a woman’s body doesn’t have the hormones to support building lots of muscle women are still scared of lifting weights when they shouldn’t be.

Coupled with this fear of weight training is an overreliance on cardiovascular training, the logic being that exercise burns calories and burning calories equals weight loss. Whilst this is true, using exercise to burn calories is a flawed strategy as it actually burns a lot less calories that you’d think.

With these misconceptions out of the way we can start to look at the tools you have available in your fat loss arsenal and how long you should dedicate to each type of training.

Your Fat Loss Toolkit!

Successful fat loss diets spare lean muscle mass while allowing you to drop fat. Badly constructed fat loss diets eat into muscle as well as fat.

A lot of women probably don’t care as long as the scale goes down and sure, you’d lose weight but you’d just be a smaller, lighter version of what you see in the mirror already.

Losing fat exclusively allows you to get stronger and maintain your muscle, this makes you look lean and toned. This is the key to a feminine, sexy physique rather than the “skinny-fat” look evident when a person loses muscle and fat.

Excessive cardio is a guaranteed way to eat into muscle so it’s for this reason I always champion focussing most of your time on strength training.
Losing fat is optimally achieved by being in a calorie deficit; the most effective way to do this is via dietary restriction. Track your food intake and ensure you’re eating fewer calories than you need each day.

In summary, whilst both cardio and strength training have a tonne of health benefits, weighing them up in the context of fat loss, strength training trumps cardio for one important reason:

Resistance training maintains your lean body mass

So Why Do Cardio?

Women tend to have stubborn fat on their thighs and hips and even during a calorie controlled diet this fat can be had to shift!

Cardio can be useful to shift stubborn fat but I would usually save it until near the end of a diet when fat loss is slowing up. After a prolonged period of dieting your metabolism will slow down making it harder to drop fat, save cardio then