This question came across my desk this week: “What counts as resistance training? Does it need to involve weights to get the best results?”
And frankly, it is quite a common question, which inspires me to address it once again, right here.
If you are looking for the “results” that I think you are – which means building of muscle for strength, or shape (or both!), which will lead to weight loss or fat loss or weight management, and optimize your metabolic rate, then you DO need “resistance training”…yet it needn’t come in the form of “weights”.
Think about it. “Resistance” means just that – you are asking a muscle work against a force that overloads its current capabilities that initiates a response which results in the building of more muscle.
If you keep that in mind, it simplifies the answer to the question regarding “resistance” training. Yes, lifting weights adds resistance – if it is enough weight to challenge your current level of strength. So do body-weight-as-resistance exercises (think squats, pushups, planks, pullups..) and isometrics (if you squeeze hard enough!), and many portions of workouts such as T-Tapp, Pilates, Bar Method, and others.
My friend Brad Pilon of Eat Stop Eat was recently grilled about the difference as well, since he recommends, as I do, some sort of resistance training in combination with Eat Stop Eat mini-fasts. This is to keep the muscle mass protected – which we all need to do no matter what our dietary guidelines. As many of my readers have been following my work with Brad and have participated in the TeleClasses Brad and I have done together, I thought I’d include a portion of his response to readers regarding this very question:
With Eat Stop Eat ANY FORM of resistance training will do. I realize that when most people hear ‘resistance training’ they automatically think ‘weight training’ however, resistance can mean so much more than simply weights.
Really, it should be called something more vague, like muscle-stress training, since what we are really trying to accomplish is adding an acute stress to the muscle. Isometrics, weight training, contact sports (think a football line or a wrestling match), and body weight exercises (gymnastics) ALL accomplish this.
Even with weight training there is still a lot of variety with what you can do and use to stress your muscles. You can use traditional tools like dumbbells and barbells or more obscure implements like lengths of chain and even rubber bands…
The most important aspect of any resistance training program is to make sure that you are constantly improving by putting the muscle under a little more stress each time you train it. The method or tools that you decide to use to create this stress are not nearly as important as the stress itself and making sure it increases in some way from exercise session to exercise session. – BP
Keep in mind that THE most important thing about resistance training is that it does what we set out to accomplish with it – it continues to challenge the muscle with the goal of delivering muscle building and/or muscle protecting results.
What Does It All Mean?
Remember that, bottom line, it MUST be work. If your workout routine doesn’t leave you with the flush of challenge, you may need to rethink and restructure to get the results you desire.
Feel free to post in comments just below with any of your thoughts or any points of clarification.
