Cardio or Weight Lifting?

In my early days of training I never really asked myself whether cardio should be a must or an option… I simply listened to my trainer and trained accordingly.

But after one year of training I progressively started to train on my own; this is when I came across fitness influencer’s social media accounts. I think at one point in our lives we all came across some Facebook or Instagram accounts extolling the benefits of different theories… One of these theories is “how weight lifting is so much more beneficial than cardio for fat loss”. Usually this assertions comes with “before” & “after” pictures, showing a flabby “cardio body” and a toned “weight lifting” body.

I am going to be honest… I used to hate cardio and it is still, up to these days, a hassle for me to get up in the morning and go do my fasted cardio before work. Therefore, when I came across this theory I was more than happy to tell myself that I could just give up on cardio and focus only on weight lifting. I was doing heavy weight lifting, HIITS, and I would stay for hours at the gym, so cardio seemed to be a waste of time.

I stopped cardio for a few months… I did not really change my diet as it was already pretty healthy and for that time, I only lifted weights… The results? I literally started looking like a wrestler.  My whole body and especially my upper body got so big and so buff that I could not even wear a dress without feeling like a gorilla…

I could not understand why I had suddenly gotten so big… So I started talking to my friends at the gym and to my trainer… And they all told me the same thing … To go back in that treadmill and get back on cardio!

I am not saying here that weight lifting doesn’t help you lose fat or that these fitness influencer are wrong. I am not a professional and I do not make any judgment here. But you have to do what works for you, what matches with your goals and not just blindly follow a theory attached to a nice picture posted somewhere. What I have learned from this experience is that it is not because something works for others that it is necessarily going to be working for me. We all have different body types, me for example I put on muscle pretty easily but I have a hard time getting and staying lean, so cardio for me cannot just be an option if I want to be toned. Plus, we all have different life styles, different diets, some take supplements, and others do not… This is why you have to find out what works for you, what fits with your lifestyle, and what is doable for you in the long term. Try, fail, try again this time differently and repeat until you find what gives you the results you want.

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