Cardio vs. Weightlifting: How To Use Both To Reach Your Summer Body Goal

Summer is right around the corner, which means your gym is probably packed to the gills with people who put off their New Year’s resolution until the weather got a little warmer. As you get your own beach body ready for the warm summer months, you may be wondering where you should place the majority of your focus: cardio or weightlifting. Before you decide which type of activity your workout routine will emphasize, it's best to know how much goes into this decision.

Cardio and weightlifting are an integral part of any successful fitness program, along with nutrition, of course. Balancing cardio with weightlifting is a tricky endeavor. It generally comes down to tailoring the amount of cardio you do to the amount of weightlifting. The effect cardio or weightlifting has on your physique is dependent on a variety of factors, including how much cardio or weightlifting, what types of cardio or weightlifting, what you’re eating, what your fitness goals are, and your body type.

“Running, cycling, and aerobic classes are examples of cardio,” Donovan Green, celebrity fitness trainer and author of No Excuses Fitness, told Medical Daily. “Cardio aka cardiovascular exercise gets your heart rate up and gets more oxygen pumping through your blood. There are big health benefits regarding cardio training, including improved circulation, it increases bone density, improves sleep, reduces anxiety, and gives you increased energy. With strength training, you are switching on more of your muscle fibres and raising your metabolism so there's more active tissue in your body. You are burning calories when sitting down after your workout.”
Weight Loss

If you’re thinking about foregoing any weightlifting or resistance training while focusing solely on cardio, then check out the physique of any long-distance runner and you’ll see what road you’re heading down. For anyone looking to take the opposite approach by foregoing cardio, don’t expect to meet any weight loss goals, especially if your body type is endomorph, meaning your body retains fat and has a harder time dropping it.

Finding the correct balance between cardio and weightlifting is all about experimentation. For example, start off with four days a week dedicated to an hour of weightlifting and the remaining three days dedicated to 30 minutes of cardio. Tailor this routine to how much energy you’re expending each day, your progress after around a month, and what you would like the final result to be.

A recent study conducted at the Duke University Medical Center revealed that a healthy combination of aerobic and resistance training is the best formula for reducing body fat and increasing lean body mass. Out of 234 formerly sedentary overweight and obese adults, those assigned to the aerobic plus resistance training group were able to not lose more weight, while also gaining more lean body mass.
Building Muscle

One of the most common misconceptions every gym rat struggles with is the notion that cardio will diminish the effect of strength training by hindering muscle growth. People with an ectomorph body type, someone with a naturally slim physique who finds losing weight easier than most, are often fooled into abandoning cardio due to this rationale. While the amount of cardio needed to lose weight is clearly more than the amount needed to build muscle, cardio is still necessary to build your ideal physique.

Deciding on a healthy medium between too much and too little cardio leads most fitness fanatics to one of the hottest exercise crazes today: high-intensity interval training (HIIT). Instead of jogging around a track for an hour at a moderate pace, alternate between intense periods of activity and slower recovery intervals. HIIT is heralded for kicking up your body’s ability to burn calories during a workout as well as when the body is resting, also known as “afterburn.”

“Another great benefit of weight training is you can get two for the price of one,” Green added. “Doing circuit training with weights will not only boost your strength it will also increase your cardiovascular system. A quick example would be deadlifts, front squats, benchpress, and lat pulls. Complete each move for 30 seconds. And repeat for a total of four rounds.”
Heart Health

Of course, being physically active isn’t always about shaping the perfect beach body. Sometimes a workout plan is necessary to improve or preserve a person’s cardiovascular health. Cardio may be short for cardiovascular, but strength training still has its place in any heart healthy workout plan. In fact, too much cardio could potentially have a damaging effect on the heart.

Research published in the European Heart Journal measured the cardiac enzymes and conduct ultrasounds on 40 long-distance runners who had recently competed in four endurance races. After each long-distance competition runners often suffered from right ventricular (RV) dysfunction, increased blood levels of cardiac enzymes — often a marker for heart problems — and 12 percent of runners even experienced scar tissue in their heart muscle that discovered a week after the race via MRI.

“Cardio in the light to moderate intensity range stimulates the body to increase overall blood volume, thereby increasing the amount of red blood cells if the behavior is maintained for over a month (the time it takes to remake blood cells),” Joey Gochnour, registered dietitian nutritionist and certified personal trainer, told Medical Daily. “It is helpful for reducing blood pressure acutely. Cardio in the light to moderate intensity range also creates adaptations in the peripheral cardiovascular system, such as increasing capillary density and overall efficient circulation.”

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Can Exercise Cause A.L.S.?

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis has been all over the news lately because of the ubiquitous A.L.S. ice bucket challenge. That attention has also reinvigorated a long-simmering scientific debate about whether participating in contact sports or even vigorous exercise might somehow contribute to the development of the fatal neurodegenerative disease, an issue that two important new studies attempt to answer.

Ever since the great Yankees first baseman Lou Gehrig died of A.L.S. in 1941 at age 37, many Americans have vaguely connected A.L.S. with athletes and sports. In Europe, the possible linkage has been more overtly discussed. In the past decade, several widely publicized studies indicated that professional Italian soccer players were disproportionately prone to A.L.S., with about a sixfold higher incidence than would have been expected numerically. Players were often diagnosed while in their 30s; the normal onset is after 60.

These findings prompted some small, follow-up epidemiological studies of A.L.S. patients in Europe. To the surprise and likely consternation of the researchers, they found weak but measurable associations between playing contact sports and a heightened risk for A.L.S. The data even showed links between being physically active — meaning exercising regularly — and contracting the disease, raising concerns among scientists that exercise might somehow be inducing A.L.S. in susceptible people, perhaps by affecting brain neurons or increasing bodily stress.

But these studies were extremely small and had methodological problems. So to better determine what role sports and exercise might play in the risk for A.L.S., researchers from across Europe recently combined their efforts into two major new studies.

The more impressive of these, which was published in May in Annals of Neurology, involved almost two dozen researchers from five nations, who developed a deceptively simple but scientifically rigorous research approach. They asked 652 A.L.S. patients if they’d be willing to talk about their lives and activities and did the same with 1,166 people of matching ages, genders and nationalities. They conducted extensive in-person interviews with each volunteer, asking them how active they had been in professional or amateur sports, at their jobs and during leisure time. They also asked about past histories of injuries and accidents, including concussions and other head trauma but also other injuries.

They then compared answers from the people with A.L.S. to those of healthier people.

The results should reassure those of us who exercise. The numbers showed that physical activity — whether at work, in sports or during exercise — did not increase people’s risk of developing A.L.S. Instead, exercise actually appeared to offer some protection against the disease. Even pro athletes showed no heightened risk, although they represented such a tiny subset of the patients with A.L.S. that firm conclusions cannot be drawn, the researchers say.

One aspect of people’s lives did significantly increase their risk of developing A.L.S.: a history of multiple hits to the head. Men and women who had sustained at least two concussions or other serious head injuries were much more likely than other people, including never-concussed athletes, to develop A.L.S.

These results coincide closely with those of the other new study, a review article published in July in the European Journal of Epidemiology, which gathered data from 50 years’ worth of epidemiological studies related to A.L.S. risk (including the other new study) and teased out the effects of physical activity. Most of the studies were limited in scope, but they amplified one another’s validity when combined, the researchers thought.

And their main finding was that “in the general population, physical activity is not a risk factor for A.L.S.,” said Dr. Benoit Marin, a neuroepidemiologist at the French Institute of Health and Medical Research in Paris who oversaw the new review.

But as Dr. Marin also pointed out, the studies involved were all associational, meaning that they cannot establish cause and effect. Exercise and a reduced risk for A.L.S. might be linked to other lifestyle factors, such as a healthy diet, and not to each other.

The new studies also cannot dispel the lingering and troubling questions about the effects of head injuries from contact sports.

“I would not consider this issue settled,” said Ettore Beghi, a neuroscientist at the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan and senior author of the study published in May in Annals of Neurology.

In the United States, a few researchers have begun to look at football and A.L.S. risk, a plausible research concern, Dr. Beghi said, given evidence that head trauma sustained playing football might contribute to neurodegenerative diseases. But to date, the football data has been inconclusive.

For now, he and other scientists are continuing to study Italian soccer players, as well as athletes in other sports, including rugby, which, for some reason, confers no increased risk of A.L.S., although it involves considerable contact. Such research may ultimately “shed some light on the underlying mechanisms of the disease, which are still poorly understood,” Dr. Beghi said.

The greatest obstacle to advancing the research, he added, is “the lack of funding,” a situation that could be ameliorated, somewhat, with all of that ice dousing.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/03/can-exercise-cause-a-l-s/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

Get a Body Like Jaime King with These 10 Tips for Healthy Summer Eating

It’s that time! We’re well past spring and the countdown to bikini season is over—it’s here! But don’t stress: Follow these simple tips to get you ready to hit the beach with renewed confidence from Kelly Boyer of Paleta, a farm-to-table meal service who is responsible for feeding some of the hottest bodies in Hollywood, including Jaime King. Just a few small swaps with your diet this summer will leave you feeling confident and ready to rock that bikini.

Continue here: http://news.instyle.com/2014/07/01/get-a-body-like-jaime-king-10-tips-for-healthy-summer-eating/