Fitness Faceoff: Cardio vs. Strength Training with Katie Lawton, MEd

Podcast Transcript

John Horton:

Hello and welcome to another Health Essentials Podcast. I'm John Horton, your host.

People love debating an either-or sort of question, and the folks that come up with topics for this show are no different. That's the easiest way to explain the fitness face-off on our agenda today. The question: Which is better for you — cardio training or strength training?

On the hot seat for this dispute is exercise physiologist Katie Lawton, who is no stranger to this podcast. She's one of the many experts at Cleveland Clinic who join us weekly to discuss how we can optimize our bodies and our health. So are you better off running a few miles in a cardio session or lifting weights during a strength workout? Your answer is coming up next.

Welcome back to the podcast, Katie. We've definitely got a fun topic to tackle today.

Katie Lawton:

Well, it's my pleasure to be back.

John Horton:

So it turns out that cardio versus strength training is something a lot of people search for online. It sounds like quite the heavyweight prize fight. And in that spirit, let's start with a tale of the tape for each contestant. We'll begin in the cardio corner. So what defines that sort of workout and what are the main benefits of cardio?

Katie Lawton:

My definition is essentially anything that gets our heart rate up and us breathing a little bit heavier. There's multiple different modes, different pieces of equipment that we can generally use — from running, swimming, biking, rowing, row machines — a plethora of different types of machines that we can generally type of use, or any type of activities — hiking, tennis — those types of activities, too. That will also increase our heart rate if we play at an intense enough of a rate where it increases our heart rate as well.

John Horton:

Anything that gets you out of breath a little bit, it sounds like.

Katie Lawton:

Yeah, so usually, again, my definition, too, is, for cardiovascular exercise, it has to be at least at a moderate intensity. Anything lighter than that or less than that is going to be considered more activity-based.

John Horton:

So what are the big benefits? When you do that and you get your heart pumping like that, and you're trying to catch your breath, what kind of benefits is your body getting out of that?

Katie Lawton:

One of the big main benefits is the prevention of heart disease. I think the American Heart Association has even said that it can reduce your chances of heart disease by about 30%. If we can be consistent with the cardiovascular, I think, is going to be the other main piece as well. But also other things — improving cholesterol, blood pressure, Alzheimer's, bone mass density, certain types of cancers — those are other types of things that the cardiovascular exercise will also help with as well.

John Horton:

Wow. What about a calorie burn? Because most of us are exercising, I mean you want to stay fit, but we're also looking to keep that belt size down a little bit. Is it going to help with that?

Katie Lawton:

Yep, absolutely. Because our body needs more oxygen, we need more fuel. And then, when we break that all down, that's when we're going to burn more calories, especially when we go into more intense type of exercise, the more calories you burn in a shorter period of time as well.

John Horton:

And although it's not called “strength exercises,” I mean, you are building muscle and strength through cardio workouts, correct?

Katie Lawton:

Yeah. Again, I think that's kind of debatable and I think we've maybe talked about it before. I've had articles before between slow-twitch muscle fibers and fast-twitch muscle fibers. Those are generally going to be more of your slow-twitch muscle fibers, depending again on the intensity as to which you're doing things. But so at least, you're building up on those slow-twitch muscle fibers.

John Horton:

And the sort of exercises you were talking about, these are what we typically think of, a lot of times, is endurance exercises or things that you do for a while, like running, and cycling, swimming, all that sort of stuff?

Katie Lawton:

Yeah, I mean, again, it depends on the intensity, I think is the big piece. And it depends on what your goal is. If you have a short period of time, you can do, within a 15-minute increment or a 15-minute timeframe, but we're going to really have to ramp up on the intensity of it. And that's still considered, obviously, cardio, or maybe more HIIT training.

And then, anything moderate-intensity, longer duration, which is like the buzzword, is “Zone 2 training,” that is going to be something where you're going to be a little bit more extensive, as far as the amount of time you're going to hold it for.

John Horton:

Now, are there recommendations as to how many minutes a week someone should devote to cardio workouts?

Katie Lawton:

The minimum is 150 minutes a week.

John Horton:

150, OK. And you can split those up any way? Or is it better to do it five days with 30 minutes, or you just get it all over with at once?

Katie Lawton:

Yeah, so the general rule of thumb is … what we kind of make it more appealing to people is saying 30 minutes, five days a week. 30 minutes doesn't seem too bad, five days a week doesn't seem too bad. I have a minimum of two days, so I at least recommend that it's done within two-day increments, and not doing it all in one day itself — because I like to try and make sure that we're getting movement in more often throughout the week as well.

John Horton:

And that was moderate cardio, right?

Katie Lawton:

Right.

John Horton:

And there's a specific definition for that?

Katie Lawton:

Yeah, so again, that is where you can hold a conversation, but raising your voice is going to be a challenge, would be the criteria, I guess, is what you can look for when we're talking about moderate intensity.

John Horton:

And if you kick it up to a higher-intensity cardio, you pick up the pace on your running, or cycling, or swimming, is that … you need to do the same amount of minutes? Or does that go down a little bit?

Katie Lawton:

It goes down about 75 minutes a week.

John Horton:

So if you want to get it over with even faster, you can just go twice as hard and half as long, and you can do it.

Katie Lawton:

Yeah, I mean, again, it all depends on what your goals are. It's not a bad idea to also vary the intensity of the workouts. Maybe one day doing a moderate-intensity, long duration, and another day, trying to do some type of interval training in there as well. The interval days, or anything higher-intensity, does take more time to generally recover from, especially if we're going to go for a little bit longer. So depending, the moderate-intensity ones, yeah, we can pick it back up the next day, generally, no problem.

John Horton:

So now that we know cardio, let's turn our attention to strength training. What defines that sort of workout? And again, what are the main benefits?

Katie Lawton:

So those are any type of exercises where we're going to use our muscles applied to some form of resistance. Health benefits to that are, and what I think, especially as we get older, is making sure that we are staying functional as we do get older. I do believe that a lot of our independence of living is based off of our strength to be able to do things around the house and on our own. And then also, diabetes, osteopenia, osteoporosis are also other things that the strength training can also help with as well.

John Horton:

It's something strength training is the sort of thing you need just to build that muscle mass. So like you said, you can keep doing daily activities for as long as possible. And even something as simple as getting up, and moving around, or reaching up into a cupboard for something, you have to have a good amount of strength or strength reserved to keep doing that throughout your life.

Katie Lawton:

Right. Our body has this amazing way of only doing what it needs to. So unless we apply a stimulus that's going to make it work a little bit harder, or make it build and make changes to have improvements, that's the only way we're really going to see those changes to at least maintain, especially as we do get older. So if you're complacent with where you are in life, I think that's one thing. And even then, we'll still see a really even steeper decline, but we want to start out with more lean muscle mass so that as we do get older and it does decline, we have a better place to generally start from.

John Horton:

And it's not just muscle mass either, right? I thought I read where strength training could help with bone density so you don't have to worry about fractures as you get older in case you slip and fall — joint flexibility, all of that.

Katie Lawton:

Bone mass density, I will say, you do have to strength train at a pretty fair intensity for us to see the improvements with bone mass density. It's not going to be something that's simply done by just picking up some really light weights and doing some high repetitions. That is something that I would definitely say that, to get a better guidance, probably seeing an exercise physiologist for, to know what intensity we need to be working out at.

John Horton:

Now, you had mentioned with strength training, that's defined by using your muscles to work against outside resistance. So that would be things like lifting, where you're trying to move something. Or if you're pulling on resistance bands where there's some sort of pressure working against your muscles, right?

Katie Lawton:

Yep.

John Horton:

What is that doing?

Katie Lawton:

That's making our muscles contract, and we call it eccentric and concentric loading, so that muscles and the muscle fibers are constantly going back and forth against that resistance. And sometimes, we can use gravity when we're doing things like pushups or squats, or you can use bands. We can talk about free weights, dumbbells, we can talk about sleds, any type of pushing, any type of sleds, or pulling any type of sleds. Those are anything doing resistance as well. Cables, machines, a lot of the machine weights are also really good as well.

John Horton:

Yeah, I was going to ask that. Because when you think of strength training, I think everyone … you have this image in your head of that classic weightlifting, where you got the bar and you're pushing this thing up. But it involves way more than that, right?

Katie Lawton:

I usually try and tell people it should be like a moderate-intensity, moderate weight. We don't want to have to think of it always having to be anything where we're always constantly … have to use a barbell or doing very strenuous type of exercises, by any means. I don't want to scare people from doing it. Pilates is actually another good way to kind of do some strength training, especially for the core. That's generally a little bit more lower impact than anything along those lines, too.

John Horton:

Well, and that's more body weight where, I mean, you use your own body, and the resistance is just gravity and you working against it.

Katie Lawton:

Yep. Yeah, and then, depending on the type you're doing, too, there's the reformer, which has the springs on it, too, so they can apply a little bit more resistance to some of those movements as well.

John Horton:

And I know you had mentioned resistance bands, which I know every time I've used those, they are so much harder than what you think these rubber bands are going to be. Sometimes, it's amazing as to how hard they work your muscles.

Katie Lawton:

Yeah. And then, that is the goal, is to really try and fatigue those muscles. That's how we know that we're getting to the point where we're using all of our muscle fibers and going through the right contraction when we're doing those exercises as well.

John Horton:

Does circuit training, when people throw that term out, does that apply to strength training, too?

Katie Lawton:

Are you talking about machine weights, like hopping from one to the next? Or pairing two exercises together? Is that what you're talking about?

John Horton:

Either way, I guess if you're combining a bunch of the strength training things together, that would just be a circuit, right?

Katie Lawton:

Yeah. Right. Yeah. So that's one way to do it. Sometimes, I call them super sets as well, where I pair maybe two, three exercises together, and you just rotate between those three exercises until you're done with however many.

John Horton:

And those, I know, can be extremely hard, a lot of times, those high-intensity ones. I know you and I talked previously about Tabata workouts, and I've done those. And holy cow, they just absolutely tax your muscles way beyond what you think should happen in 20 seconds.

Katie Lawton:

And generally, the goal on those, Tabata or HIIT workouts, in that sense is to combine some of the cardio with some of the strength training so we can combine it for time purposes, so that we're doing both our cardio and the strength in the same workouts as well.

John Horton:

Are there guidelines as to how much time folks should devote to strength training every week?

Katie Lawton:

There's not, as far as much time goes. My rule of thumb is you should hit each muscle group twice a week.

John Horton:

So break that down for us then. Is that, you should spend a day on upper body, a day on lower body? Or how do you recommend breaking that up?

Katie Lawton:

Depending on how many days a week you have. So if you're able to allocate two, three days a week, then we can talk about doing one upper body day, one lower body day, and then maybe the third day is a full body routine. If you can only do two days a week, then you're probably looking at full body routines each time. And then, if you have four or five days a week, then we can really start breaking things apart a little bit further.

John Horton:

Go a little crazy. That's what my son does. There's arm day, back day, I mean he goes nuts. And yeah, you can get really intense with it.

Katie Lawton:

Yep. Right.

John Horton:

Now, whether you're doing cardio or strength training, it sounds like you're running for a good workout. So from an exercise physiology perspective, how are they similar?

Katie Lawton:

Well, the good thing is, is again, when you are doing your cardio, we are doing some form of work on our slow-twitch muscle fibers. But the difference is, is where we need to start working on those fast-twitch muscle fibers, which is when we get … when we're doing our strength training. Sometimes, again, when we're doing some strength training, we can combine some of the cardio in with it, but you have to have the intention of doing probably some more cardio moves. So there are two separate entities in my mind, and I think that's why it's important to do both and not put one over the other.

John Horton:

And I was going to say, the main differences between them then, it sounds like, are the muscle groups that you're working. And you said, for cardio, it's more of those slow-twitch muscles. And for those who don't know, because I think we've all heard the term, what is that exactly?

Katie Lawton:

Sorry. Those are those muscles we use on an everyday basis. They're the ones that turn on first when we're doing any type of walking, or I guess, walking is the big one, or we're doing any type of daily activities. Because what happens is, is our muscle fibers don't all get used at one time. And so the slow-twitch muscle fibers are the first ones that we use during the day itself.

John Horton:

It sounds like they're like our utility muscles.

Katie Lawton:

Yep.

John Horton:

They're the things that just are always working. It's the water, the electricity, the power in your house. I mean, it's going to keep everything running.

Katie Lawton:

Right.

John Horton:

Now what about then, there's fast-twitch muscles?

Katie Lawton:

Those are the ones that get used when our slow-twitch muscle fibers all fatigue. So that's why we have to think about strength training as being a reason or a mode to train our fast-twitch muscle fibers because all of our muscle fibers … as soon as those slow-twitch muscle fibers get ran out, we start delving into our fast-twitch muscle fibers.

John Horton:

Well, and that's usually for if you need a burst too, right? If there's an emergency situation, I take it those slow twitch muscles tax out pretty quickly and you got to rely on those fast twitch muscles as your emergency reserve?

Katie Lawton:

That's one thing that's a little bit hairier because there's Type 2A and Type 2B muscle fibers. So when we need those quick-burst ones, that's one of the Type 2 muscle fibers that we use for jumping and those types of activities. So that one's a little bit different as well. That's a harder question to delve into, I think. But yes, when we talk about sprinting and jumping, that's a different type of muscle fiber as well. I wouldn't say different type. It's a fast-twitch muscle fiber, but-

John Horton:

…[…] for a whole fast-twitch muscle episode. We can really get into that. So now, I guess, we've gone over both of these — cardio, strength. So now, I guess the big question, which is where we started, which one is better?

Katie Lawton:

Neither.

John Horton:

Neither. Ugh.

Katie Lawton:

They're both just as important. I do think, again, we have to talk about our heart, and our lungs, we have to talk about our muscles. And I think in order for us to live a long and healthy lifestyle, those two need to come together. And I do think that both of them are just as important and I don't usually put one over the other.

John Horton:

Man, but everybody likes to have a winner. But it sounds like each one helps the other a little bit.

Katie Lawton:

Yep. And I know there are people out there that absolutely would rather pick one over the other, but I would like to think that there is generally a mode or a way, if you delve into it, and if you experience different things, that some way in some form, we can always make sure that we are doing either strength training or cardio in some way or fashion.

John Horton:

Well, and like you said, I think most of us do gravitate to one or the other. And if you go all in on one, the other one becomes so much harder.

As we've talked about before, I run. And strength training usually doesn't fit into that that much, but I know I've been trying to make an effort to do more, just because, I know talking with you so much, and other doctors here, and everyone, you realize how important it's to build that strength.

Katie Lawton:

Yeah. And again, if you've never really spent that time planning it out, or if it's not something you really enjoy doing, you're not going to really place it into that schedule as well. With runners, though, too, it is sometimes a little different because if you are running a race, yeah, strength training should potentially be on the back burner a little bit. I don't want to say to stop doing it altogether. But I do think that if we're not running any races, or if you're just doing it for leisure, then we absolutely need to be making sure that we are placing in some of that strength training.

John Horton:

Plus, you wear a lot of tank tops, so you don't want to look too bad in it. You got to get a little muscle on top. You don't just want some chicken wings out there.

So if you want to get the most out of your cardio and strength training, what's the best way to work both of them into your exercise routine?

Katie Lawton:

Two options. I think one is going to be, again, doing that 30 minutes of some form of cardio, and then, also planning on doing a half hour, 45 minutes of some type of strength training those two days a week. Or again, you have seven days a week. If you want to think about doing cardio five of it, strength training two, on those other two days, you can also think about it being that way as well. Some people … all we have are 15, 20 minutes every day to work out, so your HIIT workouts, HIIT videos might be your only option for time purposes, two, three, four days a week, to really make sure we're compacting all those in there as well.

John Horton:

Can you do them both on the same day?

Katie Lawton:

Yes.

John Horton:

Now, if you do that, is there a benefit to doing one first? Should you start cardio and then do strength? Or start with strength and then end on cardio? Does it make a difference?

Katie Lawton:

So scientifically, yes. But I think for us general population people, who aren't really training for anything, no. I generally will, even done it myself, where it's like, "Well, I don't feel like strength training today. I'll just get on the treadmill and just do some running." But by the time I'm done with my running, I might have a little bit more energy. "Okay, fine. I'll go do some strength training." Or vice versa, maybe I don't feel like running. I'll go do some lifting, get a little bit of energy, and then go back on the treadmill.

Now if you're training for something in particular, if you are running for … training for a weightlifting event, then yeah, you're obviously going to want to do your weightlifting or your running first and then, the cardio is going to be the secondary piece to it.

John Horton:

Now, you said there was some research that pointed it was better to do one before the other. What is that? What do they say?

Katie Lawton:

Again, that's kind of like what I was saying before, if you are a runner, you want to train with your running first. So that is something, you're going to ... because you don't want to use all of your energy doing strength training beforehand and then try and go for a run after. Again, if you're weightlifting, or if you have any weightlifting events that you're essentially training for, you don't want to be doing your cardio first and burning all your energy out on your cardio.

John Horton:

Well, after all this exercise talk, I'm sure everybody is ready to get moving, Katie. So before we say goodbye and change into our workout clothes, do you have any other words of wisdom when it comes to fitness routines and working in cardio and strength?

Katie Lawton:

Just making sure we're talking to our health professionals, making sure it's safe for us to do exercise. If you're in physical therapy, make sure that you're checking with your physical therapist on certain exercises that you should be doing — cardiology, primary care physician. And if you have not done any exercise in the last couple of years, you probably want to get a physical done first before starting out into an exercise program.

John Horton:

As always, Katie, it's great to have you on. I always love our talks, and I'm always … I'm charged up and ready to start working out as soon as we get done chatting.

Katie Lawton:

Well, thanks for having me.

John Horton:

When it comes to picking between cardio and strength workouts, the answer is simple, choose both. Each offers benefits that can make you stronger and more fit. Combine them, and you'll be moving toward tip-top health.

If you liked what you heard today, please hit the subscribe button and leave a comment to share your thoughts. Until next time, be well.

Speaker 3:

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