New clients to our Gym often query:  “Where are the treadmills, bicycles and rowers?” What they don’t realise is that you can improve cardiovascular / aerobic fitness with weights.
Done in the correct way you can get all the usual benefits from Weight Training such as shaping the entire body, boosting Metabolic Rate (and therefore burning Body Fat) and increased energy and also boosting Aerobic Fitness.
Clients are delighted to discover this as it is much more efficient to achieve all your workout aims in one shot instead of the old way of thinking where you did a weight training workout for certain benefits and then an ‘Aerobic’ workout for other benefits.
Doing long duration, low intensity activities can burn muscle as well as fat and since muscle burns fat this can have a negative impact on your overall results.
There are certainly some benefits to the cardiovascular system from ‘aerobic’ activity but the reality is simply that these effects could be achieved in a safer and more efficient manner through the use of the correct type of weight training.

Why avoid Aerobics?

• “Aerobic” activity is not the most effective form of exercise for fat-loss. Activities such as running, cycling, swimming etc. do not burn a significant number of calories!

• In any fat loss programme, it is important to maintain muscle tissue while burning fat, because muscle gives you your shape, burns Body Fat, boosts Metabolic Rate & increases energy. Strength training is the only reliable method of maintaining muscle tissue. Aerobics can actually cause you to lose muscle tissue!

• Aerobic activities burn extra calories while you are doing the activity (but too few to make a difference!). They don’t really burn many calories after you stop, in other words these activities don’t boost your Resting Metabolic Rate (the rate at which you burn calories at rest).

• On the subject of Metabolic Rate: Every pound of muscle added to the body of an adult female will require an additional 75-100 calories per day just to keep it alive. The average person, through a programme of proper strength training can add enough muscle (5lbs) to burn an additional 3500 calories (or 1lb. Of fat) per week. The amount of strength training required to effect such a change is less than one hour per week.

• “Aerobic” activities can damage your body! Running is an extremely high-impact activity that is damaging to knees, hips, and back.

• Consider this: Dr. Kenneth Cooper (author of Aerobics, The New Aerobics, Aerobics for Women), the US. Air Force Cardiologist who coined the term “aerobics” and has promoted their use for over 25 years now admits that he was wrong! According to Dr. Cooper, further research has shown that there is no correlation between aerobic endurance performance and health, longevity, or protection against heart-disease. He will admit, however, that such activities do carry with them a great risk of injury. Further, he admits that gross-overuse activities such as running may be so damaging to the body as to be considered carcinogenic (cancer causing).

• Sooner or later the avid jogger will probably pay the price for all that “healthy” activity. If that price is a decrease or loss of mobility in one’s later years, then “aerobics” have effectively shortened the individual’s (healthy) life span. Loss of mobility can be the beginning of a downward spiral of ill health.

Without exception, everyone who follows our programme here at Lifegym improves their Aerobic Fitness without doing any Aerobic type exercise. Just by doing the appropriate Resistance Training.