I’m often talking about the importance of resistance training for fitness, health and weight loss, and that is absolutely the best place to focus your exercise efforts.
Resistance training should be your priority.
But there is some benefit to adding in aerobic exercise too.
Make sure you choose something you enjoy though – don’t look only at the calorie burn and instead also consider what you’ll be able to maintain long term.
If you love a nice long walk on the flat, that’s great. If you prefer to do something that feels a bit more like exercise like hill walking, running, swimming or cycling, that’s great too. If HIIT is your love, then go for it.
HIIT does burn more calories per minute BUT you can’t achieve this high calorie use for your whole workout because you have to take rest breaks in order to achieve the intensity.
So actually, the calorie burn of each workout largely averages out, even if you have to look at it across the week rather than session by session.
This is because, if you’re doing HIIT properly, you’re only going to be able to do it a couple of times a week, yet you could do something less intense much more frequently.
Clearly, it’s not only about the calorie burn though.
If you have the time, the gold standard is to have a variety of aerobic exercise across your week.
Choose something you enjoy, and do a couple of interval type sessions a week. You could include a section in your resistance workout to cover this, which is what I often do when I write a program for a client.
Also, include some low intensity activity most days.
By doing this, you’ll be supplementing your resistance training routine perfectly.