Bodypump - strength or cardio?

julesloveland

Is Les Mills Bodypump cardio or is it enough resistance to preserve muscle?

BalletAndBarbells

Cardio. If you build up weights is a good intro to resistance training but the rep count is too high so it'll always be restricted on the weight you can use and will always be more cardio.

SonyaCele

i think its more of a general fitness type activity. If you do it, you will preserve the muscles required for that type of exercising. I see a lot of girls in bodypump that look great.

hill8570

It's kind of an in-betweener -- endurance lifting. It's enough resistance to preserve (or even add) muscle if you don't have a whole lot to begin with, but any strength gains will top out fairly early. If you switch from lifting heavy to nothing but BP, you'll lose absolute strength over time (but gain endurance...no surprises there).

julesloveland

OK thanks. As I am losing weight and don't want to lose lean mass I was wondering if BodyPump was enough. Looking at my definition it seems enough for now, but that could be because I am losing fat so you can see more definition. Possibly I will need to start lifting heavier the closer I get to my target weight.

jbee27

SonyaCele wrote: »

i think its more of a general fitness type activity. If you do it, you will preserve the muscles required for that type of exercising. I see a lot of girls in bodypump that look great.

Agreed. I just started going to a weekly class 3 weeks ago, and there are some BP veterans that are in awesome shape, and are using pretty substantial weights (for the amounts of reps that are done.)

I view it as a general exercise class that's somewhere in the middle of cardio and weights. It's been a nice intro to the different types of lifts, now I can see myself someday venturing out into the gym to do deadlifts or squats, whereas before I didn't even know where to begin.

Tweaking_Time

I did this program and, while it is most definitely less cardio-like than a pure cardio exercise, in my opinion it is closer to cardio than strength training.

HOWEVER - you can very easily tone down the reps by adding weight to make it more like strength training if you like.