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Do you need long distance running or jogging on top of weight lifting for healthy heart & lung function? Do you need aerobic training to improve cardiovascular fitness if you do weight lifting? Or is weight lifting enough?

If you’ve done 5×5 Squats with 1.5x your body-weight, you know your heart worked as hard as your legs. The stronger you get the stronger your muscles, your joints, but also your heart becomes. This post will explain why.

Aerobic vs. Anaerobic Exercise. Aerobic exercises use lipids (fats) with oxygen for energy. Anaerobic exercise use ATP-PC or glycolisis (carbs) for energy. That’s one of the reasons you need to eat carbs.

Short, high intensity sports like weight lifting, sprints, MMA are anaerobic. Long, low-intensity sports like jogging, walking, marathons are aerobic. You can find an overview of the energy systems used in sports here.

The Cardiovascular System. Your cardiovascular system is composed of your heart, blood & blood vessels. Some of its tasks include:

• Moving nutrients to/from cells and returning waste from cells
• Carrying oxygenated blood from your heart to your body/lungs
• Returning deoxygenated blood to your heart

Cardiovascular Fitness. Has nothing to do with endurance. It means having a healthy cardiovascular system: healthy heart & long function. Cardiovascular fitness decreases risks of cardiovascular diseases like high blood pressure.

Cardiovascular fitness also helps recovery between sets & workouts. Increasing your cardiovascular fitness improves oxygen & nutrients supply to your muscles, but also waste removal from your muscles.

Image credit: Healthwise

Cardiovascular Adaptations to Weight Lifting. Your left ventricle pumps blood to your body. Your right ventricle pumps blood to your lungs. Here’s what happens when you do weight lifting.

• Muscle contractions compress blood vessels.
• This increases resistance to blood flow and thus blood pressure.
• Heart must pump harder to supply blood to your muscles & rest of body.

The stronger you become, the more muscle you’ll have. The muscular wall of your left ventricle will thicken so your heart can deal with the increased blood pressure. This is how weight lifting improves your cardiovascular fitness.

Do You Need Aerobic Exercise? Weight lifting increases cardiovascular fitness above average. Unless you want to run marathons or compete in long distance bicyling you don’t need aerobic exercise.

Actually even if you run marathons, interval training & weight lifting are superior to aerobic exercise. Same thing for fat loss: interval training & weight lifting are superior to aerobic exercise.

Endurance Training for Anaerobic Sports. Sports like MMA demand endurance, strength, speed & power. You can build strength, speed & power with strength training, but you can’t achieve the necessary levels of endurance.

Aerobic exercise is slow. It interferes with strength, speed & power you need for anaerobic sports. The best way to build endurance for anaerobic sports is high intensity interval training: HIIT.

The problem: endurance & strength training are hard to combine. HIIT stresses your central nervous system which can impair performance. But that’s the topic of another article.