Weight training is better than cardio for fat loss, right? Wrong. In the past few years people started to believe that resistance exercise is better than cardiovascular exercise for almost everything and especially for weight loss and cellulite reduction. The rationale is that with weight training you build muscle and that that muscle has higher metabolic needs, leading to more calorie burning, “even in your sleep”. However, this effect is exaggerated and the notion that weights contribute so much to metabolism increase could not be further from the truth. Cardiovascular exercise, especially high intensity “cardio”, like HIIT, interval running, spinning etc, burns way more calories than weight training. At the same time CV exercise also leads to long-term calorie burning - not via increased muscle mass, as with weight training - but via increased overall body metabolism and thermogenesis…
Pilates, weight training, running and inflammation
A client asked me a few days ago if this “advice”, given to her by a complementary health practitioner, is true: “You should not do any other exercise than Pilates, otherwise you will inflame your body”. This, of course, is an absolutely preposterous statement which goes against all common sense. You can only imagine the millions of inflamed athletes - or just billions of inflamed active common people - since the dawn of humanity all the way until the 1920s, when Joseph Pilates developed a method of exercise that would not inflame the human body…