A physician buddy asked me whether the general population should focus on cardio or lifting — and I wanted to share my answer with you. In this solo cast, I break down why cardio and resistance training produce different adaptations, offer my go-to weekly framework for getting started, and talk about zone two training, high-intensity intervals, VO2 max assessments, and why compliance beats the perfect program every time. Plus, the Flexible Meathead Cardio Course is open for enrollment through Wednesday. Sponsors: Fitness Insider Newsletter: https://miketnelson.com/
A physician buddy asked me whether the general population should focus on cardio or lifting — and I wanted to share my answer with you. In this solo cast, I break down why cardio and resistance training produce different adaptations, offer my go-to weekly framework for getting started, and talk about zone two training, high-intensity intervals, VO2 max assessments, and why compliance beats the perfect program every time. Plus, the Flexible Meathead Cardio Course is open for enrollment through Wednesday.
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Speaker 3: [00:00:00] Hey there, what's going on? It's Dr. Mike Nelson here with the Flex Diet Podcast, and today is just a very short solo cast. We'll have another guest coming up, um, this week, but today in honor of the Flexible Metech Cardio Course is open. I've got some bonus items here through this coming Wednesday, so we'll put a link down below where you can get in on that course if you'd like.
Today's question was. Question I got a while ago from a physician buddy about cardio versus lifting, and I wanted to give you my short solo cast answer here. And then if you want more information on the Flexible Meathead Cardio course, we'll put a link down below. You'll be able to enroll. Uh, there. If you have any questions, uh, hit me up.
And wanted to get this information out to you, and then we'll have another [00:01:00] guest interview coming up later this week once again. So without further ado, here's my answer to cardio versus lifting. Enjoy.
Speaker 2: Here's the question then that came up once again, who was from a physician buddy of mine. Asking them about for general population. Should they focus on resistance training, lifting weights. Or aerobic training. And part of this was spurred by a great review, which was published and exercise sport and movement from a CSM.
Entitled quote. The health benefits of resistance exercise beyond hypertrophy and a big weights and quote. The main author is Swan S a w a N. Dr. Stu Phillips was on here and other researchers. And they made the argument, which I would tend to agree with that we have prioritized in recommendations.
[00:02:00] Aerobic training. And that we should probably move resistance training to a higher priority. Their last sentence, they said, quote, To optimize health, especially with aging resistance training should be emphasized. In physical activity guidelines, in addition to aerobic training and quote. What I liked about that is they're not saying resistance training is superior or that aerobic training is superior. They're stating that both of them are important.
And they're making the argument that resistance training should be moved up a little bit higher on the priority list. So this then begs the question. Should you be doing cardiovascular? Training aerobic training, or should you be lifting? For general health purposes. And below is my response to doc, buddy of mine who had this exact question.
I just wanted to put this out there. Because I think this will be [00:03:00] an important discussion coming up. And if you don't want to listen to any more, no short answer is. I think you should do both of them. And you can make an argument for health that they're different. They have different responses and doing both of them are beneficial.
If you want the more long-winded response then. Tune into the rest of my audio response to him here. Take care.
Dr Mike T Nelson: Hey doc, what's going on? Thank you so much for the good questions. I appreciate it. My bias is, I always look at who is making the recommendation and in what content context and for what audience. So Sam Milan's got a lot of really great stuff. I love all of his research, like really awesome stuff.
His background is also high level cyclists. I That's most of what he works with. Obviously he is working on some pathologies and some other projects too. So in that group, is there some [00:04:00] specific benefits to doing a lot of zone two work? As I mentioned before, yes. Maybe oxygen extraction, maybe some other benefits.
You get a lot of potentially blood flow coming back like it's into. Cardiac concentric versus eccentric hypertrophy and a bunch of other rabbit holes. But I think for his population, yeah, I think it's good. If the average person off the street, if they did four bouts of 45 minutes of zone two training, would they be beneficial?
I think yes. The hard part then is compliance. I don't think most people would do that. . And then it gets into an argument about for the average person, is it better for them to do walking or to do zone two? My bias there is I would probably have 'em get eight to 12,000 steps per day and then worry about some cardio stuff.
In terms of Brad's paper tell Mr. Brok they said hi. Yes you can. Cardiovascular benefits from some [00:05:00] resistance training. However you have to again, consider the audience that you're talking about for that. So in the paper they cite here health benefits of resistance training beyond hypertrophy and big weights.
I'm, yes, it is beneficial. So any muscle contraction that you do is going to be of. benefit. Again, I would have to read the review to see what they're actually citing in terms of population, but it, most of the studies are talking about are people are not super high level trained. And most of the time when I've read their arguments and from talking to Stu and other guys, that the argument is, Hey, just getting him to do some weightlifting is gonna be beneficial over them doing.
Which is a hundred percent true. And in from some studies on untrained individuals, do they see cardio, respiratory, cardiovascular benefits from lifting? Absolutely. The hard part is after you [00:06:00] get past kind of the newbie games and people start to be a little bit trained, you have different effects. If you go all the way to high level elite, , you've got radically different effects.
And this gets into a discussion about potential interference effects, et cetera. So I look at it from risk benefit ratio. So my general biased advice to people who are relatively healthy, looking to be more healthy general population, not elite level, high level athletes. People who are. Even necessarily exercising a lot would be to do some form of both.
So my general go-to is most people can carve out an hour Monday through Friday, whether that's their lunch before work or after work. Weekends get a little bit tricky for people. So if you can just give me one hour per day, Monday through Friday, I would say Monday, Wednesday, [00:07:00] Friday, do some lifting Tuesday, Thursday, do some.
Start there. I don't even give a crap what you do to even start, but just start doing something. If that's 10 minutes of cardio on Tuesday and Thursday, great. If that's 20 minutes of lifting Monday, Wednesday, Friday, great. Anything you can do is gonna be better than where you're at before, which for a lot of people isn't much of anything.
After that, I think you can scale up to, around an hour dedicated for each one of. I would say the next level I would look at getting some type of high intensity interval training in. I stole this from my buddy, Dr. Andy Galpin, but if you can just reach close to your peak heart rate once a week, I think you'll get a lot of benefits from that simple thing for people to do if they have a bike or a rower.
Just go as hard as you can for one to two minutes. I think you'll still see some benefits from that. Again, this is a population who has not done a lot of that work before. So you're biased. There is a prioritized resistance training, which [00:08:00] I would generally agree with. You can make a very good argument that as people get older, you're gonna have some sarcopenia.
They're gonna start losing muscle mass. On the flip side, you can also argue that they're losing a VO two max and losing aerobic stuff. But if you put a gun to my head and told me to say, pick aerobic training or resistance training, again, I would probably pick resistance training. But again, I think the answer is you should just do both.
You said prioritize resistance training and then throw in one to two 30 minute bouts of zone two recovery work. Yeah, I think that's fine. Again, the huge caveat here is what will they actually do? I find in general for even people who are pretty athletic, getting them to do 30 minutes of zone two work can be quite difficult.
So in that case I may have 'em do a little bit more higher intensity of work. You said for your own case you've been adding one to 30 minutes of zone two. I like that. Of you two, two max. Session of four by four minutes on the treadmill per week. Yeah, there's some really early data. [00:09:00] Ah, I'm blanking on the author.
I'll think of it. That showed for VO two max increase high intensity work or higher intensity work, I should say, of a duration of four to six minutes is probably best. So one thing I found more by Pure Accident before I found that study was if I'm really cramped for time, if I just get on the rower five days a week, and I do.
About of six minutes where by the end of it, my heart rate is high, but not ridiculously high. So the other day I did this with nasal breathing and my max heart rate was 1 55. The day before is 1 63. My max that I can hit on all out sessions about 180 7. So it's not all the way up. It's probably zone four.
I did find that's enough to keep my VO two max pretty good and sometimes make a little bit of improvement. So yeah, you can do it on treadmill, you can do it on a bike. I like doing a rower cuz you can see power [00:10:00] output from it. So your question is, do you think this is sufficient to drive necessary physiologic benefits?
Most likely, I would say yes. Again, it depends on the intensity. But. ? Yeah, probably fine. Question is, could someone get adequate mitochondrial adaptations solely for resistance training that are more effective or as effective? Killed birds of two one stone compared to sitting on a bike for 60 minutes three times a week?
I would say you probably could in people who are untrained or have a very low VO two max. So again, my bias, which again, not to add complexity. Is, I like to do some assessments so I know what they're, what I'm dealing with. Very simple ways to do a VO two max. You can do a 2000 meter row on a concept two rower.
There's some good published data on that. You can do a 12 minute Cooper run test. Those tend to be the two that I [00:11:00] use by far and away the most often. If people can't do that, you can look up other tests. There's a Y M C, A step test and some other tests you can. , I then take their VO two max at a as a normative, so milliliters per kg per minute.
And then I compare that to normative data for population. If they are very poor, shit, almost anything I can do, we'll see a benefit. If they're in the middle of the pack, I look to see what they've actually been doing and I'm probably gonna bump up intensity on it. If they're already really good.
They're probably doing some aerobic training or they're just a genetic freak and they may not need a lot of work. So I like to do an assessment to see where they're at. Most people also by doing an assessment, wanna see normative data and see how they rank. And that in and of itself for, again, most people is a way to drive them to get better.
Usually if I've done like a two K and the number is very [00:12:00] low, I'll come back and say, Hey, this puts you at the bottom 20% of a population. If anyone is competitive at all, their next question is, oh crap, how do I get better? . So again, there's many ways to go. The last point is at some point I don't think you can see more cardiovascular benefits from resistance training.
If you look at the mechanisms of what is involved they're just two. Now again, there is some overlap. Cause the question is, can you just, and in more advanced athletes or people that have a higher VO two max, can I just lift weights faster and see aerobic benefits? My bias there is probably not you will get better at lifting weights faster.
So a Metcon thing. But I think that is its own adaptation and that if you really want classic cardiovascular adapt. , at some point you're going to have to do more cardiovascular work. Real simply, that just comes down to [00:13:00] blood flow and mechanics. If you think about what's going on with, say, a very hard and heavy Metcon, is your heart rate elevated?
Yes. Is it difficult? Yes. But your heart is also having to contract against contracting musculature. So your after load of the cardiac system is gonna be higher, which is. Then say getting on a bike and doing some zone two, zone four work, where you've got a massive amount of blood flow coming back to the heart and your after loads.
So the amount of pressure the heart has to contract under is actually substantially lower. Again, that gets into differences in cardio, or, I'm sorry, concentric versus ecentric cardiovascular hypertrophy. So I think at a high. Most athletes I work with who only like lifting do better by adding some lower to moderate intensity cardio for 4, 8, 12 weeks.
And then we'll add a little bit more intensity work from there. So [00:14:00] I know that's incredibly complicated and the short answer is for general population, almost anything they do because they are untrained, you are gonna see some benefits from it and we should just start. As they progress, as they get better, then you're gonna have to try to diversify a little bit on what stimulus do you really want to prioritize, which I'm back to my bias template of Monday, Wednesday, Friday.
Lift some heavy stuff, pick things up, don't care too much about rep range at that point. Just do something to get stronger. Hold onto muscle, maybe add some muscle. Tuesday, Thursday, maybe Saturday, do some form of cardiovascular. Modes for cardiovascular training would be running, rowing, biking versa, crimer, cross-country skiing.
That's about it. I stole that from my buddy, Dr. Kenneth J some rhythmic cyclic movement that you can do [00:15:00] for a longer period of time. So work on those benefits there. And I think that simple approach will get you quite. Even as you advance and how would you check? Simple way to check would be a redoing the assessment of the VO two max.
Again, you'd probably want to use the same modality that you used when you tested them. So if your pretest is 2000 meters on the rower, then your retest would be a two K on the rower. Cause if you change modalities it can be a little bit different just due to athlete or clients not used to it and different mechanical efficiencies, et cetera.
So again a little bit of a long-winded answer. Last point. I do think zone two training is beneficial, but I. Constantly doing zone two training. If you have a higher VO two max, probably not gonna have a huge benefit for you. [00:16:00] Again, if you're an elite level cyclist, by virtue of you doing zone two work, that is recovery work, you may see some benefit from that.
We could argue is the benefit at that point from constantly doing zone two work, or is the benefit from the fact that you did zone two work, which by definition means you're not doing another high intensity session. So again, in high level athletes, especially the handful of cyclists I've worked with, they're crazy people.
And anything to try to get them from not pegging themselves all the time or doing the same intensity, work generally has a benefit which gets into more of a polarized training approach. So again, long-winded answer, hope that's helpful. Take care (Abou Sawan, Sidney; Nunes, Everson A.; Lim, Changhyun; McKendry, James; Phillips, Stuart M.. The Health Benefits of Resistance Exercise: Beyond Hypertrophy and Big Weights. Exercise, Sport, and Movement 1(1):e00001, January 2023) .