Does intense-but-brief resistance training have the same positive effects on the cardiovascular system as aerobic exercise? This is an important reason why I exercise; because it’s generally established that regular exercise has benefits for the heart independent of weight.* Does resistance training have the same effect? I guess probably if you do it intensely enough to raise your heart rate, which I don’t; I find my “aerobic” workouts (usually hour-long swims) much more intense than the weight-lifting portion of my workout, which I don’t consider as important.
*Wise, F. (2010). Coronary heart disease—the benefits of exercise. Australian Family Physician, 39(3), 129-133. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.
The answer from Body by Science is yes, very much so. I can drown you with quotes from the book if you like. Sadly, Amazon seems not to have fully implemented page numbers into the Kindle highlighting feature.
The overall argument as I understand it (my understanding may be faulty) is this:
1) Low intensity exercise does not do any part of you including your heart much good because it fails to significantly stimulate the kind of adaptation you want. You need to get your heart pumping hard if you want to trigger an adaptation, and low-intensity aerobics does not do that. High intensity aerobics does, but that is (3).
2) Long-duration furthermore potentially does your body much bad through wear and tear and accidents (don’t forget probability of accident per second is multiplied by time to get total probability). As you’ll see in the quotes, they claim (and have evidence for the claim, but you need to consult the actual book for full details) that exercising for long periods does not give you additional body-adapting benefits over and above exercising for short periods. So the long duration is (a) mostly wasted (except I suppose for direct calorie burning, but they emphasize that exercise is overrated as a calorie burner) and (b) potentially harmful.
3) High intensity (this can be high intensity aerobics such as the stationary cycle and it can also be high intensity resistance) does your body good (including your cardiovascular system, because your heart is working hard) by stimulating adaptation (for example, muscle building, but not only that). You can get much more information on the benefits of high intensity exercise (for all parts of you including your heart) if you google “high intensity interval training”.
As a consequence of (1), (2), and (3), they recommend high intensity short duration exercise with a long rest period in between (for your body to recover and build).
They make the interesting additional point that steady-state activity (which is necessarily low-intensity long-duration exercise), while not benefiting you physiologically, creates the illusion of physiological adaptation when in fact what is adapting is essentially your nervous system. You learn to move your body more efficiently. So for example, if you walk for long periods, then as a result you will learn to walk for long periods (through economy of motion) but your learning will be limited to that one activity (because each activity has a different set of efficient motions which has to be learned anew).
Keep in mind that here I am only relaying the claims of the book’s authors. Much of what they say makes sense to me but I have suspicions about some bits of it and I do not vouch for it.
Quotes (with some bit boldfaced by me):
Strength training is actually the best way to train the cardiovascular system precisely because, unlike what we refer to as “aerobics,” strength training actually involves and stimulates all of the components of metabolism. This includes the metabolism that goes on in the cytosol (the liquid portion of the cell and in the absence of oxygen) and the metabolism that occurs in the mitochondria (i.e., in the presence of oxygen).
and
Your cardiovascular system, it should be remembered, is always engaged. It’s engaged when you are standing in a room talking to someone: your heart is beating, your blood is circulating, and your lungs are taking in air and expelling carbon dioxide 24-7. The only way to get your cardiovascular system to work harder is by performing mechanical work with muscle. Any increase in muscular demand simultaneously increases the involvement of your cardiovascular system to a much greater extent. So, you are always “doing cardio” in the popular sense of the term whenever you do anything—or nothing.
Given the interrelatedness of the various metabolic cycles, the notion that you can separate any of these metabolic cycles out from each other is erroneous; they are always running concurrently and together, though some of them can outpace the others. Anything that defines exercise from a metabolic sense is raising the intensity level above its baseline, and even if such pathways could be isolated, they shouldn’t be if your goal is total health and fitness.
and
Remember that the purpose of the cardiovascular system is to supply certain nutrients that are needed by the muscles and to help remove the by-products of the consumption and utilization of these nutrients. Cardiovascular health is often confused with aerobic conditioning, the latter of which is always specific to a particular activity, such as running or stationary cycling. Cardiovascular health, by contrast, equates to the ability of the heart, lungs, and bloodstream to supply whatever the muscles need. According to an abundance of studies, the cardiovascular system receives tremendous stimulation and benefit from resistance exercise.
and
Indeed, there is no additional physiological advantage afforded to one’s body, including endurance or cardio benefits, by training that lasts more than six to nine minutes a week.
and
(Most of the perceived conditioning in steady-state activity is actually a result of the body’s finding a way to make the exercise easier through improved economy of motion, and not because of improved cardiovascular condition. This is why a runner who performs another steady-state activity such as cycling will be gasping for air.
and
Your heart and lungs cannot tell whether you’re working your muscles intensely for thirty seconds on a stationary bike or working them intensely on a leg press. The heart and lungs know only about energy requirements, which they dutifully attempt to meet. Four thirty-second intervals of high-intensity muscular exertion is four thirty-second intervals of high-intensity muscular exertion, whether that takes place exclusively in the lower body, as in stationary cycling, or in both the upper and lower body, as in resistance exercise. In either scenario, it is mechanical work by muscles that is the passkey to the aerobic and other metabolic machinery within the body’s cells.
and
If the intensity of exercise is too low, nothing much in the way of a stimulus is presented to the body. On the other hand, if the intensity is too high in an activity such as running, you will increase the stimulus for positive adaptation, but you will also appreciably increase the chance of doing damage that will undermine your health.
“there is no additional physiological advantage afforded to one’s body, including endurance or cardio benefits, by training that lasts more than six to nine minutes a week.”
This claim seems almost absurd to me. What evidence is used in support of this? Are any studies cited?
don’t forget probability of accident per second is multiplied by time to get total probability
No, that would give you the expected number of occurences (assuming independence, which is likely a bad assumption in this case). If the probability of injury in a second is P (given no previous accidents) and you exercise for T seconds, or until an accident occurs, then the probability of an accident occuring during the session is (1 - (1-P)^T), which is the probability of not having the conjunction of T accident free seconds.
I accept the technical correction. But for P close enough to zero, the probability remains nearly linear up to large T. So while you are technically correct I do not think you have refuted my statement as a very close approximation for a typical session lasting an hour or several. Given that, and given the relative difficulty of thinking about an exponential function, I prefer my formula for conveying the essential point in a comprehensible way.
It would be better to make the use of approximation explicit, and to specify the domain in which the approximation is a good one, like “don’t forget probability of accident per second is multiplied by time to get approximate total probability, given small total probability”.
No no, I am saying I erred outright. I simply used a heuristic and forgot it was a heuristic. You corrected me. That’s why I had not identified it as an approximation initially. But that said, I find the correction to make the reader’s task difficult, and my heuristic retains approximate validity, so I pointed that out in my reply.
This is why a runner who performs another steady-state activity such as cycling will be gasping for air.
Maybe that’s why I gasp and feel like I’m dying every time I try to run, despite being in supposedly good shape. On the other hand, conditioning my body to run efficiently would be very useful in terms of transportation (using your own body to walk or run places is free!)
Your heart and lungs cannot tell whether you’re working your muscles intensely for thirty seconds on a stationary bike or working them intensely on a leg press.
Can your muscles tell? I’m often sore the day after doing weights in the gym, but also the day after biking, or running, or playing tag with children (if I haven’t done any of these things in a while.) I swam with one of my friends who doesn’t swim regularly, and pushed her hard, and she was pretty sore the next day.
I presume they would say that your muscles can tell whether the exercise is low-intensity or high-intensity. However, the quote that you are replying to is specifically comparing high-intensity leg press to high-intensity stationary bike, i.e., two forms of high-intensity exercise which involve comparable amounts of work. I don’t recall that they specifically addressed that comparison. My overall sense of it, based on all I’ve read (including online discussions), is that high-intensity is good either way—either stationary bike or resistance.
Does intense-but-brief resistance training have the same positive effects on the cardiovascular system as aerobic exercise? This is an important reason why I exercise; because it’s generally established that regular exercise has benefits for the heart independent of weight.* Does resistance training have the same effect? I guess probably if you do it intensely enough to raise your heart rate, which I don’t; I find my “aerobic” workouts (usually hour-long swims) much more intense than the weight-lifting portion of my workout, which I don’t consider as important.
*Wise, F. (2010). Coronary heart disease—the benefits of exercise. Australian Family Physician, 39(3), 129-133. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.
The answer from Body by Science is yes, very much so. I can drown you with quotes from the book if you like. Sadly, Amazon seems not to have fully implemented page numbers into the Kindle highlighting feature.
The overall argument as I understand it (my understanding may be faulty) is this:
1) Low intensity exercise does not do any part of you including your heart much good because it fails to significantly stimulate the kind of adaptation you want. You need to get your heart pumping hard if you want to trigger an adaptation, and low-intensity aerobics does not do that. High intensity aerobics does, but that is (3).
2) Long-duration furthermore potentially does your body much bad through wear and tear and accidents (don’t forget probability of accident per second is multiplied by time to get total probability). As you’ll see in the quotes, they claim (and have evidence for the claim, but you need to consult the actual book for full details) that exercising for long periods does not give you additional body-adapting benefits over and above exercising for short periods. So the long duration is (a) mostly wasted (except I suppose for direct calorie burning, but they emphasize that exercise is overrated as a calorie burner) and (b) potentially harmful.
3) High intensity (this can be high intensity aerobics such as the stationary cycle and it can also be high intensity resistance) does your body good (including your cardiovascular system, because your heart is working hard) by stimulating adaptation (for example, muscle building, but not only that). You can get much more information on the benefits of high intensity exercise (for all parts of you including your heart) if you google “high intensity interval training”.
As a consequence of (1), (2), and (3), they recommend high intensity short duration exercise with a long rest period in between (for your body to recover and build).
They make the interesting additional point that steady-state activity (which is necessarily low-intensity long-duration exercise), while not benefiting you physiologically, creates the illusion of physiological adaptation when in fact what is adapting is essentially your nervous system. You learn to move your body more efficiently. So for example, if you walk for long periods, then as a result you will learn to walk for long periods (through economy of motion) but your learning will be limited to that one activity (because each activity has a different set of efficient motions which has to be learned anew).
Keep in mind that here I am only relaying the claims of the book’s authors. Much of what they say makes sense to me but I have suspicions about some bits of it and I do not vouch for it.
Quotes (with some bit boldfaced by me):
and
and
and
and
and
and
This claim seems almost absurd to me. What evidence is used in support of this? Are any studies cited?
No, that would give you the expected number of occurences (assuming independence, which is likely a bad assumption in this case). If the probability of injury in a second is P (given no previous accidents) and you exercise for T seconds, or until an accident occurs, then the probability of an accident occuring during the session is (1 - (1-P)^T), which is the probability of not having the conjunction of T accident free seconds.
I accept the technical correction. But for P close enough to zero, the probability remains nearly linear up to large T. So while you are technically correct I do not think you have refuted my statement as a very close approximation for a typical session lasting an hour or several. Given that, and given the relative difficulty of thinking about an exponential function, I prefer my formula for conveying the essential point in a comprehensible way.
It would be better to make the use of approximation explicit, and to specify the domain in which the approximation is a good one, like “don’t forget probability of accident per second is multiplied by time to get approximate total probability, given small total probability”.
No no, I am saying I erred outright. I simply used a heuristic and forgot it was a heuristic. You corrected me. That’s why I had not identified it as an approximation initially. But that said, I find the correction to make the reader’s task difficult, and my heuristic retains approximate validity, so I pointed that out in my reply.
Maybe that’s why I gasp and feel like I’m dying every time I try to run, despite being in supposedly good shape. On the other hand, conditioning my body to run efficiently would be very useful in terms of transportation (using your own body to walk or run places is free!)
Can your muscles tell? I’m often sore the day after doing weights in the gym, but also the day after biking, or running, or playing tag with children (if I haven’t done any of these things in a while.) I swam with one of my friends who doesn’t swim regularly, and pushed her hard, and she was pretty sore the next day.
I presume they would say that your muscles can tell whether the exercise is low-intensity or high-intensity. However, the quote that you are replying to is specifically comparing high-intensity leg press to high-intensity stationary bike, i.e., two forms of high-intensity exercise which involve comparable amounts of work. I don’t recall that they specifically addressed that comparison. My overall sense of it, based on all I’ve read (including online discussions), is that high-intensity is good either way—either stationary bike or resistance.