Just completing cardio workouts is a terrible way to burn body fat or get leaner because it causes metabolic adaptations that slows down your metabolism.
For a woman we have been marketed this way, and have been over training with cardio or pure volume, using small weights, and in most cases small pink weights!
Strength training is great to create lean muscle and keep a better metabolic rate.
High reps have been the biggest marketing tool women have been given, yet if you worked on lifting more weight (heavier weights) and less repetitions (6 reps x 6 sets) to give your body a better adaptation. Move away from those small pink weights please.
- When you just work on the ‘calorie burn’ aspect of a workout, you are not seeing the true value of working out.
- What you do a lot of, your body gets good at doing, so doing more cardio – it’s just that you get better at doing cardio only.
- If you work on just cardio you build your body to work on endurance and stamina – it also aims to become efficient with calories , so it tears down muscle and it learns how to burn LESS calories over time, so you slow your metabolism down with lots and lots of cardio.
Lot’s of cardio is not a bad adaptation – it gets you better at cardio, but if you want to have a more adaptable metabolism so that you don’t have to work out as much to maintain your fat loss or to burn body fat – it’s a terrible approach.
Concentrating on strength training will make the body adapt more often.
Strength training is just that – you are building to get stronger, to get stronger you need to build more muscle, your body prioritises more muscle over being efficient with calories so you get a faster metabolism.
An adaptable metabolism makes fat loss easier and it makes it easier to maintain, now you’re just burning more calories just sitting there doing nothing. Adapting the amount you eat weekly also keeps the metabolism adapting.
The irony of strength training is that women have been marketed with all this cardio workouts, and deterred away from resistant/strength training, when in fact when you live in the modern world, the thing you should focus on most is, if you want to get lean and have a “sculpted body”, and you don’t want to have to work out 7 days a week, is literally is to lift weights.
Important note: Being a man or a woman you are an individual – all that matters is – ‘is your body responding?’, it’s not about a program for a man or a program for a woman, it’s about your goals.
Each client needs to be looked at differently, especially for women when it comes to hormones and life cycles – it’s about working on what their needs are for that session that week, to bring the right fit to the person, to suit THEIR goals.
Personal trainers should not put people into the same box when you work with clients individually.
