Traditional Cardio Vs. Metabolic Resistance Training

Traditional Cardio Vs. Metabolic Resistance Training

Well, you are planning to lose some extra weight and confused to what is right. Whether traditional cardio method will help in cutting down the excess fat clustered around your waist, or should you go ahead and give a chance to metabolic resistance training that keeps your body fit and toned.

Also, on top of that, it can be quite boring when you search on Google for ways to lose the excess fat. Well, it would be here that you came across the term and exercise metabolic resistance training. Now the only concern you would be having is which among the traditional cardio and metabolic resistance training is better.

Exercise Is All About Training Your Mind and Body

Whenever, it is related to health, fitness, and losing fat; various individuals commonly think and wonder about the best exercises to do and if there is something like ‘a one size fits all’. Frankly, both metabolic resistance and traditional cardio have their own benefits.

Here there is a huge difference among both the cardio and metabolic exercises. Cardio is all about assisting in losing weight but sometimes you run and run, still not losing any weight. You do have to keep in mind that sometimes cardio might not be the best method for losing weight. More importantly, it is not the only way too.

There are many solutions like adding interval training with metabolic training. This will allow individuals to spend less amount of time right in the gym and get better results.

What Is Cardio Exercising?

As per the fitness industry, the term cardio is just a normal exercise that is done for increasing the oxygen demand to the muscles. This is for a longer period and here it uses bigger muscle groups and getting done within 30-60 minutes.

Practically, cardio is like any other kind of exercise that puts a huge demand on the cardiovascular system. Various other kinds of exercises like yoga, Pilates, weight training, boot camp, etc fall under this category.

There is a huge difference among each of these categories as the cardio is more of a steady-state type of exercise which is done for a long period of time and is primarily focused on improving endurance. Cardio exercising is best for any individual that is on the lookout of improving fitness. Even it is good for any individual that needs cardiovascular, endurance, and respiratory health.

What Is MRT (Metabolic Resistance Training)?

Metabolic resistance training is simply all about strength and this technique focuses on strength exercises that allow for faster accelerating of the metabolism and even help in losing the body fat, along with building muscles.

Frankly, most of the MRT workouts will need high-intensity exercises and high repetitions. Here the MRT training is simply classified as the best anaerobic training, which is just high-intensity training. This is just like normal exercise where you cannot have a normal conversation and even might be out of breath.

Well, in this way, you can exercise in less time. Cardio exercises help in improving respiratory, endurance, and cardiovascular system. On the other hand, metabolic resistance training helps in efficiently burning more fat and will help in speeding up your metabolism, thereby building strength and providing good health benefits.

Benefits of Cardio Exercises

There is a popular and famous belief that getting into shape and losing a good amount of fat is possible if one does long and slow cardio exercises. Well, this has evolved from certain philosophy stating you can lose more weight if you can burn a lot of calories.

The basic truth here is that calorie counting won’t work, and this is because of hormones. Sometimes people doing slow cardio will suffer from reduced T3 hormone production and even lesser production of testosterone. Here they would get suppressed because of elevated cortisol levels.

Concerning the T3 hormone, this would be produced by your thyroid glands that help in burning fat. It gets easily suppressed when your body is reacting to stress.

Now if there is not a good amount of fat-burning hormone, then our body will begin to gain fat immediately. By cardio exercises, you cannot just speed up your metabolism. This is due to the speeding up of the metabolic rate which would be more than the muscle mass.

Some of the major benefits are –

Benefitting Joints and Brain

Cardio exercises are beneficial for the human brain and joint health. Various studies prove that physical activity will lower the chances of getting dementia risk irrespective of whatever your age is. Besides that, there are other benefits like –

  • Improves thinking ability and memory
  • Increases the flow of blood and reduces the chance of getting a stroke
  • Fights with the decline in the function of the brain as one age
  • Secures the body from getting Alzheimer’s diseases
  • Helps in fighting osteoporosis and lowering the chances of getting a hip fracture
  • Easily manages the arthritis discomfort and maintaining the joint range of motion.
  • Helps Muscles, Skin, And Weight

Irrespective of how you are selecting to move, if you are active, you can easily increase your circulation. This will lead to healthier and clearer skin. There are other benefits that are more than related to your skin.

While working out your muscles, it will easily increase the supply of oxygen. This allows the muscles to work harder. Hence, over time, regular cardio exercises will help your muscles to adapt to increasing the workload, so the regular activities will be easy to do.

Lungs, Pancreas, And Blood

Like most of the organs of your body, the pancreas helps in converting the food that is eaten as energy and even helps in the digestion process. By being active, the blood sugar control will improve, stress on the vital organs gets reduced and even the chances to develop type 2 diabetes will reduce. Also, your cholesterol level gets improved and the blood fat is lowered.

Sexual Functions

Most people will not know that their physical workout helps in sexual functions. Well, this is greatly true. Also, workouts help in reducing the chances of getting erectile dysfunction among men and sometimes they lead to greater arousal among women.

In addition, studies show that being active will improve one’s erectile function and proves to be the greatest and best factor to avoid erectile issues.

Mood

Well, no doubt, our mood gets fluctuated on daily basis. However, staying active will help in boosting one’s mood and this is mostly after a stressful day. Next time when you are feeling stressed or feel like having a bad day, all you need to do is move your body.

Energy and Sleep

Now you might be surprised to know that there are various reasons why you would feel great after a quick workout. With physical activity, your energy increases and it releases endorphins. This provides you with lasting energy all around the day.

After a long and busy day, struggling to fall asleep is the last thing that you want.

Benefits of MRT Exercising

Unlike other exercises, metabolic resistant training provides a huge benefit in speeding one’s metabolism. Here it would help in covering all the necessary muscles group and patterns.

Frankly, the best way for speeding up your metabolism is just by putting up more muscles. The major reason for this is because our human body is great at transporting fat and nutrients in the body. Hence, this clearly states that MRT exercising would not burn that many calories while you are working out, but it will do so when you are taking rest.

The sped-up metabolism will help in burning more calories when you are taking rest for the 24-hours after the workout. Hence, this means that a one-hour workout session will help you to burn huge calories after taking rest.

Some of the major benefits of MRT exercises are –

Burning Huge Calories While Working Out

Frankly, the MRT workouts would themselves be sometimes effective. In certain cases, you might burn around 600 calories and that too in a single session, which would be based on what kind of exercise you are doing and how hard you would be doing.

Burning More Calories While You Are Resting

Just consider this as the post-exercise oxygen consumption or the EPOC. This is the scientific term called the ‘afterburn’ effect. The afterburn effect is when the body continues to burn calories for a lot of hours even after one does a lot of workouts.

You might have to think of afterburn like the momentum. If you are pushing a ball, it would continue to roll for a certain while as soon as you take out your hands. Here if you are pushing a bit harder, then it will roll further.

In the metabolic training, when you are pushing an extra harder this will make your metabolism go longer and even harder as soon as you are done.

Building Faster Muscles

Another major benefit is muscle growth. Metabolic training uses the compound exercises along with resistance with the best high-intensity training. This will help in exhausting and recruiting various muscles and even triggers the release of various growth hormones.

In all kinds of a metabolic training session, you will feel your muscles burning. Now, this is the major indication of the internal process involved in releasing the cocktail of the hormones for building muscles making you stronger all the time.

Providing Cardiovascular Benefits

About most of the traditional weight training exercises, you would be doing is set, rest, and repeat. Now your heart will work when you are lifting but it will not be that much.

In the same way, metabolic training would be based on the strength moves and you will not be having the same kind of rest. The heart would be pumping as hard as your body is working to keep up the pace.

Difference Between Traditional Cardio and Metabolic Resistance Training

The following are the major differences –

1) Intensity

Regarding the intensity, metabolic resistance training is filled with full-body exercises, high intensity, etc that needs to be done in a repetitive mode. However, compared to this, the traditional cardio exercise is a whole-body exercise that would be done from low to moderate in terms of the intensity.

2) Anaerobic or Aerobic

Keep in mind that traditional cardio workouts would either be anaerobic or aerobic. This will be based on the amount of effort taken by the person and the exertion in doing the various exercises.

Metabolic resistance training is like any other kind of anaerobic form of training. This means that high-intensity exercises will make individuals breathless for a short period of time and they would be unable to hold any kind of normal conversation.

Basically, MRT is considered as the best fat burning type of workout. The regime would aim to be suitable for those exercises and that too in less time span.

3) Calories Burnt

When you are doing MRT exercises, the impact of all the strong effort will help in boosting the repair cycle of the body and that too into hyperdrive. This will mean that you end up burning more fat and calories in 24 hours as soon as you complete the MRT exercise, compared to the traditional cardio exercises.

4) Muscles Loss

Doing a steady rate of cardio will lead to fat loss. Along with fats, it will help in empowering the loss of muscles. Regarding both the MRT exercising and weight, training will help you to save a lot of their muscles and even lead to weight loss.

Wrapping

Ultimately, both traditional cardio exercising and metabolic resistance training lead to extensive weight loss. They do provide intense experience and that too in a condensed time frame. Also, they will elevate your fitness level, but the results that these two exercises provide will be different. Go ahead and try both and see for yourself. It depends what works best for you and how long it takes for you to reach your goals.

Author

Saravavan Nadarajan (Vanan)

Vanan, fitness expert and leader at EzFit Singapore, specializes in holistic training—home-based, boot camps, and corporate fitness—with over a decade of industry experience.

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