Can Weights Count As Cardio

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If you were given a choice, which would you choose, weights or cardio?  People tend to gravitate towards the style of training that they enjoy doing, which is why so many women prefer cardio and so many guys lift weights.

It’s great to see this trend slowly being reversed with more and more women venturing into the weights area of gyms and even better to see some of the more muscle bound guys heading off to group fitness classes.

My question today is, “Can Weights Count As Cardio?”

The World Health Organization (WHO) Physical Activity Guidelines in 2010 stated that all healthy people aged 18 – 64 years should perform around 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous-intensity aerobic exercise each week, although it can be difficult to measure intensity for science’s sake, so one way we fit pro’s measure intensity is to monitor a person’s heart rate, the closer your heart rate is to your maximum, the more intense the exercise.

The question of whether weights can count as cardio was recently examined.

Researchers recruited 16 young people (11 men and 5 women) to perform some typical weight training exercises whilst wearing a heart rate monitor.

The upper-body exercises performed included the bench press, lat pull-down, shoulder press, bicep curl, and triceps pushdown. The lower-body exercises comprised the leg press, leg extension, leg curls, calf raises and abdominal crunches.  The subjects performed 3 sets of 12, 10, and 8 repetitions with 80% of their 1RM and an inter-set rest period duration of 90 – 120 seconds.

There was no mention in the study as to the tempo of the exercise.

What the researchers discovered was that the subjects spent 51% of their workout time at a heart rate of 55% or greater of the their maximum heart rate.

When separated into lower and upper body, lower body exercises kept the subjects heart rates at 55% or greater of their max heart rate for 75% of the time, while upper body exercises only kept their heart rates at 55% or greater for only 45% of the workout.

Reference: Can resistance-training contribute to the aerobic components of the physical activity guidelines, by Hrubeniuk, Prokop, Myrie, Sénéchal, and Bouchard, in International Journal of Exercise Science, 2014

Summary:

It’s clear from not only this study but from my own personal experiences with training my clients in over 15,355 sessions (at last count) that if you structure the weight training program correctly, with the right exercise selection, appropriate tempo and rest between sets interval, you DEFINITELY can replicate a cardio physiological response from lifting heavy weights.

You do NOT have to lift light weights fast with high repetitions to elicit the same physiological response as a high intensity cardio session can do.

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