“Lifting weights plus cardio is better than cardio alone for losing fat.”
Adding lifting to cardio gets people leaner than cardio alone, with the limit that it does not take off many more pounds of fat.
Expect the payoff from adding lifting to cardio to show up in your waist, your strength and how your clothes fit more than on the scale. Plan your cardio and lifting around time you can keep up week after week; in the trials, part of the edge for people doing both came from simply doing more exercise in total.
Set up a weekly plan with two full-body lifting sessions alongside your cardio, in an amount of total time you can stick with.
One 8-month randomized trial and a network meta-analysis agree that adding lifting to cardio gives a leaner body (lower fat percentage, smaller waist, more muscle) even though the pounds of fat lost are about the same. The cardio-plus-lifting versus cardio comparison rests on only a few trials, and the groups doing both cardio and lifting usually exercised more in total.
Adding lifting to cardio gets people leaner than cardio alone, with the limit that it does not take off many more pounds of fat. In an 8-month trial, the group doing both cardio and lifting lost a similar amount of fat to the cardio group (5.4 versus 3.7 pounds, a gap that could be chance) but cut its body fat percentage twice as much (2.0 versus 1.0 points) and added 1.8 pounds of muscle. In the trials, the best results came from eating in a modest calorie deficit and doing both cardio and lifting: in a 6-month trial of dieting older adults, that group lost the same fat as the cardio group but about 2 pounds less muscle, and gained the most in everyday physical function.
The cardio in the 8-month trial was about 12 miles' worth a week on treadmills, elliptical trainers or exercise bikes at a fairly hard, steady pace, with no diet change. Waist size fell about 0.6 inch with cardio plus lifting versus about 0.4 inch with cardio alone, and the cardio-only group's muscle did not change. A network meta-analysis of 15 trials found cardio plus lifting added about 2 pounds more muscle than cardio alone, with no difference in weight, waist or pounds of fat, and ranked it the most likely best option for fat mass. In the 6-month trial of dieting older adults, the cardio-plus-lifting group lost about 3.7 pounds of muscle versus about 6 pounds with cardio alone.
In the 8-month trial, the cardio group was prescribed about 134 minutes a week and the lifting group about 180 minutes, so the group doing both cardio and lifting did roughly double the exercise time of either single group. Part of its advantage is simply doing more.
Can adding lifting protect muscle while you diet?
Yes. In pooled trials of obese older adults on a calorie-cut diet, those who lifted three times a week held their muscle steady (up about 0.1 pound) while the diet-only groups lost about 1.7 pounds, and fat loss and weight loss were about the same in both groups.
- Willis LH, Slentz CA, Bateman LA, et al. Effects of aerobic and/or resistance training on body mass and fat mass in overweight or obese adults. J Appl Physiol. 2012;113(12):1831-1837. DOI: 10.1152/japplphysiol.01370.2011. PMID: 23019316
- Schwingshackl L, Dias S, Strasser B, Hoffmann G. Impact of different training modalities on anthropometric and metabolic characteristics in overweight/obese subjects: a systematic review and network meta-analysis. PLoS One. 2013;8(12):e82853. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0082853. PMID: 24358230
- Villareal DT, Aguirre L, Gurney AB, et al. Aerobic or resistance exercise, or both, in dieting obese older adults. N Engl J Med. 2017;376(20):1943-1955. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa1616338. PMID: 28514618
- Sardeli AV, Komatsu TR, Mori MA, Gaspari AF, Chacon-Mikahil MPT. Resistance training prevents muscle loss induced by caloric restriction in obese elderly individuals: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Nutrients. 2018;10(4):423. DOI: 10.3390/nu10040423. PMID: 29596307. PMCID: PMC5946208