strength training with no cardio?
futureMrsWalker
Posts: 8 Member
Is it okay to do? What kind of results might you expect to see? My husband and I would like to start lifting and such, which he has some "experience" with (high school football), but I don't. any recommendations for a beginner?
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Replies
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Sure it's ok. One could argue that *some* cardio is advisable, though, for other health reasons. My definition of cardio is pretty tame compared to other people's. I might do intervals on a treadmill now and then, but mostly it's walking with an incline. it's good for you.
As to a lifting routine for beginners, checkout stronglifts 5x5, and do research on good form for those lifts (watching videos, etc).0 -
Yes, it's okay to do it. Cardio does have health benefits, namely for it's namesake, the heart. It is also useful if you want to earn a few extra calories to eat. Is it absolutely necessary? No. Is it a good idea to do a little for health reasons? Sure.
I try to throw in 20-30 minutes of cardio 2-3x a week for the health benefit though my main fitness focus in currently on lifting heavy with the main compound lifts and a few accessory lifts.
It all boils down to personal preference in the end.
I also second stronglifts 5x5 as a good beginner program with proper form being of paramount concern for the beginner in order to avoid injury and to get the most out of each exercise.0 -
What are your fitness goals?
If you're trying to lose weight there's nothing wrong with strength training in fact many people from the community would highly recommend it even when trying to lose weight. The problem however is that it is inefficient to try to grow muscle mass while eating at a calorie deficit. I personally lift heavy weights while eating at a calorie deficit to preserve my muscle and mitigate muscle loss from eating at a deficit. I am noticing some gains in strength now but I'm also still a noobie to lifting and that's to be expected for now.
I'd recommend a combination of strength training and cardio. Have a good 5x5 program like Evan recommends but maybe in the in between days do cardio. I can burn 800-900 calories on an elliptical working at my target heart rate for an hour, lifting weights I can only burn 1/3 of that (at least by my estimates).0 -
Will lifting with no cardio help with weight loss at all? I do have a bunch of weight to take off, but I'd prefer to focus on getting strong (along with eating healthier).0
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Weightloss is all about calories in vs calories out.
Eat at a deficit and you will lose weight.
Lift weights for body.
Run/cardio for heart.
I also run so i can eat more!0 -
Will lifting with no cardio help with weight loss at all? I do have a bunch of weight to take off, but I'd prefer to focus on getting strong (along with eating healthier).
It depends on what you mean by "help." It will help maintain muscle mass while in a caloric deficit. It will not burn as many calories as doing regular cardio workouts. Without cardio, you have less wiggle room in your diet, as far as total calories go.
As the saying goes, you can't out train a poor diet. In this case, a poor diet would be defined as one where you exceed your caloric goals for the day.0 -
Will lifting with no cardio help with weight loss at all? I do have a bunch of weight to take off, but I'd prefer to focus on getting strong (along with eating healthier).
Losing weight means creating a calorie deficit. You can create the deficit by just eating under your calorie goal or with a combination of exercise. Cardio gives you more bang for your back with burning calories if you work at a high enough intensity.
You can absolutely lose weight with weight training, just make sure you record your time and effort properly. I use fitness pal's estimate for weight training but cut the time in half. If I work out for an hour, I say 30 minutes to be safe. (Fitness pal tends to over-estimate)0 -
High Intensity Weight Training is what you should be looking at. Construct your weight training in such a manner that you are doing "whole-body" workouts in circuits with no rest between exercises. Focus on compound movements alternating between upper body and lower body (Squats and Pull-ups/lat pulldowns) to hit the biggest muscle groups in your body (back and legs). This will not only keep your heart rate up and effectively replace the static state cardio (treadmill running/walking) most people think of when you say the word "Cardio," but will also burn way more calories during and post work-out than any static cardio you could think of.
You will get far better results with HIT training twice a week replacing cardio.0 -
Weightloss is all about calories in vs calories out.
Eat at a deficit and you will lose weight.
Lift weights for body.
Run/cardio for heart.
I also run so i can eat more!
^^This!!!!!0 -
Will lifting with no cardio help with weight loss at all? I do have a bunch of weight to take off, but I'd prefer to focus on getting strong (along with eating healthier).
You can lose weight without cardio, as long as you are eating fewer calories than your body is using each day. Consuming adequate protein will help preserve lean body mass (muscle). There are many very lean body builders who do little or no cardio.
Google "body recomposition" -- it sounds like this may be what you're interested in.0 -
High Intensity Weight Training is what you should be looking at. Construct your weight training in such a manner that you are doing "whole-body" workouts in circuits with no rest between exercises. Focus on compound movements alternating between upper body and lower body (Squats and Pull-ups/lat pulldowns) to hit the biggest muscle groups in your body (back and legs). This will not only keep your heart rate up and effectively replace the static state cardio (treadmill running/walking) most people think of when you say the word "Cardio," but will also burn way more calories during and post work-out than any static cardio you could think of.
You will get far better results with HIT training twice a week replacing cardio.
I have a goal of getting in exercise 3 days per week to start, what would you recommend for the 3rd day if I did HIT on the other days?0 -
Dumb question here.. So if I am aiming to lose one pound a week, giving me 1750 calories a day, and I'm eating under that amount - will I not be able to gain muscle with strength training?0
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My trainer says less cardio more strength training - to lose weight!
He says do cardio to make your heart happy, do strength training to make your butt look good! LOL0 -
Dumb question here.. So if I am aiming to lose one pound a week, giving me 1750 calories a day, and I'm eating under that amount - will I not be able to gain muscle with strength training?
You can gain STRENGTH while losing weight.
But you will not be gaining muscle mass while losing weight.0 -
My trainer says less cardio more strength training - to lose weight!
He says do cardio to make your heart happy, do strength training to make your butt look good! LOL
AMEN!0 -
High Intensity Weight Training is what you should be looking at. Construct your weight training in such a manner that you are doing "whole-body" workouts in circuits with no rest between exercises. Focus on compound movements alternating between upper body and lower body (Squats and Pull-ups/lat pulldowns) to hit the biggest muscle groups in your body (back and legs). This will not only keep your heart rate up and effectively replace the static state cardio (treadmill running/walking) most people think of when you say the word "Cardio," but will also burn way more calories during and post work-out than any static cardio you could think of.
You will get far better results with HIT training twice a week replacing cardio.
I have a goal of getting in exercise 3 days per week to start, what would you recommend for the 3rd day if I did HIT on the other days?
I recommend Stronglifts 5X5 as good beginner worout. I have been doing it for a couple months now and I don't do any cardio unless I know I need the extra calories for a piece of cake or something. Start with the bar to get your form down and then work your way up to heavy lifting.0 -
If your goal is to lose weight and gain strength, you absolutely don't need cardio. And if you are a beginner who is overweight, you should be able to get along for a little while with getting stronger and losing weight, as long as you eat enough protein and don't keep your caloric deficit too low. It will become more difficult to do this as you exhaust your newbie strength gains and your supply of excess calories (your fat), so at that point you can choose to stay at the same weight while slowly losing fat and gaining muscle or try to preserve your new-found muscle and cut calories so you lose more fat. I'd recommend starting strength or a similar barbell based linear progression program. Also, strength training does contain a small cardio component in that, from set to set, you don't usually fully recover from the previous set, so your heart gets a decent workout and becomes stronger.0
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What everyone else said, and this...
http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/724405-resistance-training-tidbitsFor starters, complete novices who have never touched a weight before as well as people who are carrying around a lot of extra fat benefit from the ability to gain muscle and lose fat simultaneously. This depends a good bit on genetics too, but in general, simultaneous muscle gain and fat loss (hereafter referred to as recomposition) is next to impossible to achieve outside the realm of novices, overweight individuals and drug users. The reason being, keeping this simplistic, is that muscle building (hypertrophy) is a very intensive process, energetically speaking. Put differently, you need a surplus of calories (more energy in than out) to facilitate recovery and growth of new muscle. While dieting for fat loss, you don’t have adequate calories to maintain your current tissue (hence the loss in weight accompanying a caloric deficit). So adding something as metabolically active as muscle tissue probably isn’t going to happen in the face of an energy deficit. As I’m typing this it seems a bit wordy but suffice it to say, unless you're fat and/or untrained… don’t expect to gain an appreciable amount of muscle while dieting.0 -
The amount of calories burned from exercising (cardio or strength) is sadly negligible over time. You can spend an hour on the treadmill (and can you really trust activity calorie estimates?) and blow it all by eating one cookie. So in that regard, like other folks are saying, focus on what you are eating for weight loss. HOWEVER, doing strength training 3x times a week will help you maintain muscle mass as you lose weight, moreso than cardio. So eat less for weight loss, strength train to improve body composition, and cardio for heart health/endurance (although strength-training or just losing pounds can help with that too). If I had to choose one over the other while trying to lose weight, strength training hands down!
So basically, there is nothing WRONG with not doing cardio while trying to lose weight, but it does have it's own health benefits worth considering.0 -
What kind of results might you expect to see?
Lose fat, build muscle, become faster, live longer. Its like a cheat code in a video game.0 -
What are your fitness goals?
If you're trying to lose weight there's nothing wrong with strength training in fact many people from the community would highly recommend it even when trying to lose weight. The problem however is that it is inefficient to try to grow muscle mass while eating at a calorie deficit. I personally lift heavy weights while eating at a calorie deficit to preserve my muscle and mitigate muscle loss from eating at a deficit. I am noticing some gains in strength now but I'm also still a noobie to lifting and that's to be expected for now.
I'd recommend a combination of strength training and cardio. Have a good 5x5 program like Evan recommends but maybe in the in between days do cardio. I can burn 800-900 calories on an elliptical working at my target heart rate for an hour, lifting weights I can only burn 1/3 of that (at least by my estimates).
this is pretty solid advice.
Goal dependent
Focus on not losing muscle mass if weight loss is the goal.
Balanced program for over all health including cardio and weights.
oh edit.
also calorie deficit- that's a biggie. If you're trying to lose- than you need that.
boom.0 -
Thanks for all the comments, keep them coming. It's helping motivate me too somehow lol
I'll definitely look into the 5x5 thing. My goal isn't necessarily to gain huge amounts of muscle, I just want to be strong. I don't want to struggle to pick my daughter up and carry her around. And yes, I want to have a nice butt
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I shared this on another thread, but it's applicable, I think, to what you want to know:
The idea is that it's: 80% diet, 10% exercise, and 10% genetics. If you've plateaued from dieting, OR you want to eat the same and still lose weight, then cardio is good at helping with that. However, if you want to see real changes in your shape, I highly recommend heavy lifting.
***Just throwing this out there: I lost 35 lbs. without doing ANY exercise. At the time, I felt like engaging in a fitness routine was unsustainable, for me. Now, that I'm reaching my goal size, I'm finding that exercise, specifically, weight lifting is most important to reaching my esthetic goals. I STILL have to watch my intake, of course. Cardio is the last on my list, for my goals.***0 -
Thanks for all the comments, keep them coming. It's helping motivate me too somehow lol
I'll definitely look into the 5x5 thing. My goal isn't necessarily to gain huge amounts of muscle, I just want to be strong. I don't want to struggle to pick my daughter up and carry her around. And yes, I want to have a nice butt
See highlighted text...
You won't. It's extremely difficult to bulk up with very little testosterone. HOWEVER, you will love the subtle changes you see in your body if you are somewhat consistent with your efforts.0 -
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Will lifting with no cardio help with weight loss at all? I do have a bunch of weight to take off, but I'd prefer to focus on getting strong (along with eating healthier).
If you want to loose, I strongly recommend you to do cardio. You will burn a ton of kcal. Just by adding between 2-3 sessions of cardio and without changing your diet, you will loose weight quickly.0 -
On MFP, you can record weightlifting under cardiovascular exercise if you search for:
Strength training (weight lifting, weight training)
It won't give you many calories burned for lifting, but if you enter it under strength training you won't get any calories credited.0 -
“Is it okay to do? What kind of results might you expect to see?”
“Will lifting with no cardio help with weight loss at all?”
Sure it's OK, as in it's not going to harm you.
Lifting weight will re-shape your body, make you more lean & compact, so you're going to lose inches & your clothes will fit better. But it's not going to do much, if anything, toward losing weight. In fact, initially you'll probably gain weight because muscle weighs more than fat per volume.
Muscle burns more calories per gram of tissue than fat, so it will increase your metabolism & have you burning more calories even at rest, but it's not a big enough difference to do much toward losing weight.
You'll burn more calories per minute doing cardio.0 -
“My goal isn't necessarily to gain huge amounts of muscle, I just want to be strong.
And yes, I want to have a nice butt.”
Women won't “gain huge amounts of muscle” because we don't have enough testosterone to bulk up. But you can get more compact and stronger.
To have a nice butt, you need strong muscles (lots of walking, elliptical, even squats, hip adduction & abduction), and you need to lose the overlying fat (by eating fewer calories than you burn, and doing cardio exercise) so the sleek muscles can be seen / appreciated.0 -
“Any recommendations for a beginner?”
1 - Start off by checking with your doctor to be sure exercise is safe for you, and discuss what a healthy goal weight is for you / your husband.
2 - Next, figure out your goal weight (if your doctor didn't already help you with this) & calories.
Here's a BMI chart: http://www.shapeup.org/bmi/bmi6.pdf
Find your height, and as a start, aim for the highest number in the green range (look to the top of the chart). If you want to adjust by a few pounds once you get there, worry about that later. So for example if you're 5'6” your goal is 150 lb.
(I'm 5'10", my initial goal is 170, which will be 105 lb down from where I was JAN14.)
The best way to control weight is to control what you eat, because it's hard to burn off calories and very easy to eat them.
It can take me an hour on the elliptical to burn 650 calories, but that's a medium chocolate malted at Culver's, which I can eat in 10 minutes.
The easiest way to figure out a healthy amount of calories is to take your goal weight & multiply it by 10. This is what my doctor & nutritionist do. So using the example of 5'6” & 150 lb, your goal should be 1500 calories. That will slowly bring you to 150 lb.
Another simple way to figure out your goal calories is to use your current weight to get the current calories needed to maintain that weight (multiply it by 10), then subtract 500 (to lose a pound a week) to 1000 (to lose 2 lb per week).
NEVER go under 1200 calories per day unless you're supervised by a doctor.
If you're starting off in the red range on the BMI chart, 2 lb per week is reasonable. As you get closer to your goal, slow that to 1 lb per week.
3 - Next, figure out which weightlifting exercises you're going to do. Start with large muscle groups (for example, squats) & finish with smaller ones (for example, calf raises).
Always work both sides – biceps & triceps, quadriceps & hamstrings, abdominals and lower back extension, etc.
4 - Then for each weightlifting exercise, learn how to do it properly so you don't hurt yourself. Look at the diagrams on the machines, get the gym's personal trainer to explain everything, read books, do a web search, etc.
Machines are easier, but train isolated muscle groups.
Free weights take more technique, but they use more muscles in concert.
5 - Now for each exercise find out how much you can lift, the absolute maximum. This is called your one-repetition maximum, or 1RM.
a - If you want to build muscle mass, do 1-2 sets of 8-12 repetitions with the weight set at 70-85% of the 1RM. You should be working hard to do the last one. When you can do 12 easily, increase the weight by 5 lb & go back to doing 8.
b - To increase endurance, do 1-2 sets of 15-25 repetitions with the weight set at 50-70% of the 1RM. If you're not tired by the last 1 or 2, bump it up 5 lb.
You could alternate days between styles, but give yourself 1-2 days off in between workouts.
I'd start with building mass for a month or so before starting to work on endurance, so you have muscle to work with. You want to lift 2-3 days per week.
For the suggestions in #5, I'm getting my information from:
American College of Sports Medicine's Resources for the Personal Trainer, 4th Edition (2014).
(Mostly pages 378-9.)0 -
Dumb question here.. So if I am aiming to lose one pound a week, giving me 1750 calories a day, and I'm eating under that amount - will I not be able to gain muscle with strength training?
You're going to hear a lot of people say it can't be done, because it's a common misconception, but people actually can gain muscle while in calorie deficit, as this study demonstrated: http://forum.bodybuilding.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=3519021&d=1310193169 (the link is to a pdf). It showed that, in a study of athletes on a calorie-deficit diet, that with heavy-resistance weightlifting and adequate protein intake, lean body mass (muscle) increased, while fat mass decreased. Overall weight decreased, as you would expect in a calorie-deficit, meaning that the participants lost more fat than they gained muscle.
This was an important observation in the study: participants who were in the slow-weight-loss group gained more muscle than the participants in the fast-weight-loss group (which had a more calorie-restricted diet). The slow-weight-loss group had a diet that targeted 0.7% loss in weight per week, meaning that for a 130-lb woman, the calories would be set to achieve a weight loss of 0.9 lb per week. If trying to preserve or gain muscle while in a calorie deficit, make it a modest deficit.
Good luck!0
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