The short answer is it depends. Is your goal to JUST lose weight (meaning, you don’t care about looking defined you just want to be skinny)? Or Is your goal to look like “Insert celebrity name here.”?
I just want to be skinny!
For those that just want to lose the fat, and don’t necessarily want a fit looking body, then yes, cardio is better than resistance training. At the end of the day if weight loss is the goal, it is a matter of expending more calories than you are taking in. Going for a run or doing HIIT cardio is going to burn more calories than a weightlifting session of the same time frame.
The downside is, you are providing not enough stimulus to keep whatever muscle you currently have on your frame. If you are eating in a caloric deficit, AND expending a lot of energy (through cardio), your body is going to prioritize losing MUSCLE over FAT. Yup. It is built for survival. It doesn’t care that you want to look good. Muscle is calorically expensive to hold onto and fat storage provides a ton of life saving calories to keep you living to see the next day. Without enough of a stimulus (aka weightlifting) to send a signal to keep the muscle, it physiologically makes more sense for your body to get rid of the muscle over fat.
I just want to be jacked!
For those that think the moment they add cardio, they’ll lose all their gains, that is incorrect as well. Adding resistance training is absolutely a must if you want to hold onto your muscle in a diet, but lifting sessions alone aren’t going to put you in enough of a deficit in the long run to get you to the body fat percentage you want.
The Solution: BOTH!
Importance of cardio
As in most things in life, the answer lies somewhere in the middle. First off, you should be wanting to be healthy both on the inside and the outside. Just because someone is ripped, doesn’t mean they are healthy. You can’t build a good aerobic capacity (which you need for heart health and longevity) without some cardio thrown in. Cardio is going to be great for increasing lung capacity, strengthening the heart, and helping blood flow.
Cardio is also super easy to throw in. It requires no gym membership. There is no skill set involved in just going for a jog, or intimidation being in a metal clanging room with a bunch of testosterone. There is also low intensity steady state (LISS) and High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). HIIT cardio is great when you are short on time, or want to burn a ton of calories in a shorter time frame. Steady state cardio is great if you want an easier time preserving muscle mass, and not taxing the heart as much. However, at a certain point in your diet, your body is going to make you more efficient and burn less calories doing the same session of cardio you are used to (again, built for survival). This is where weightlifting comes in.
Importance of Resistance Training
The more muscle you have on your body, the more CALORIES you burn at rest. Doesn’t that sound great?! If you are burning more calories at rest, then you can not only eat more calories without excess fat gain during your lean bulk, but you can incorporate less cardio/ implement it a lot later into your diet if you are afraid it’ll zap away your muscle.
Also, I’m assuming the whole point you are asking this question is because you want to look damn good in a swimsuit. Resistance training, and having a consistent workout plan of training 3-4 days each week will be a huge part of that puzzle.
Try This:
3 Full Body Workout days - 1 exercise per muscle group - 3 sets of 6-8 repetitions (choose a weight where you can hit that rep range and only have 1-2 reps left in the tank).
2 days - these can be done after a workout or on their own day - 30 minute steady state cardio (could be jogging on treadmill, playing basketball, swimming, etc. Enough to get your heart rate up but you can still carry on a conversation just a little bit)
1 day - HIIT Cardio - on a non-workout day - For those just starting out focus more on doing HIIT cardio in the form of sprints on a bike, rower, or even outside on the track. 5 minute warmup, 4-6 30 second sprints with 1-1.5 minute break in between, then cooldown for 5-10 minutes.
This will ensure you are maximizing calorie burn through cardio to increase that deficit you need to lose the excess body fat. The 3 workout days will ensure you are providing enough of a stimulus to keep and possibly even add on a little bit of muscle during this process.
