Strength vs Endurance: Why are you wasting your time in the gym?

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Originally Posted by Austin Baraki

Though not the specific paper you are referring to, this is one that Jordan and I came across showing similar effects to what you describe. Increased stiffness w/ RT versus aerobic exercise, but RT increased vasodilatory capacity to a greater extent than aerobic exercise. Of course, this is still not looking at important clinical endpoints.

https://www.nature.com/jhh/journal/v...jhh200836a.pdf

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Yeah, here's something similar: Effect of unilateral resistance training on arterial compliance in elderly men. - PubMed - NCBI

We saw localized vasodilation in trained limbs using the IHG therapy I mentioned before, but an overall effect was a reduction in blood pressure. My question is (probably poorly framed) so if we see no change or increase in stiffness but improvement in vasodilation, endothelial function, and increased peripheral vascular function--i.e. return to healthy levels of BP and/or normal biological markers in the endothelium--what's then is the problem? Couldn't arterial stiffness simply be a systemic response to the increased dynamic pressure induced during RT? An adaptation necessary to accommodate the stress?

Lastly, in know the studies below are results of isometric contractions for a hand-grip protocol, but I would imagine that there is significant isometric work being done during heavy RT with barbells.

Here are some of the articles (a few after I quit working for this company):

Isometric handgrip training improves local flow-mediated dilation in medicated hypertensives. - PubMed - NCBI

Effects of isometric handgrip training among people medicated for hypertension: a multilevel analysis. - PubMed - NCBI

Acute vascular responses to isometric handgrip exercise and effects of training in persons medicated for hypertension. - PubMed - NCBI

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22260503

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24174307

(This one is just here for laughs): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17999012

And these as interest:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15849230

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15677730

http://hyper.ahajournals.org/content/59/4/e35

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Originally Posted by slhuckstead

We saw localized vasodilation in trained limbs using the IHG therapy I mentioned before, but an overall effect was a reduction in blood pressure. My question is (probably poorly framed) so if we see no change or increase in stiffness but improvement in vasodilation, endothelial function, and increased peripheral vascular function--i.e. return to healthy levels of BP and/or normal biological markers in the endothelium--what's then is the problem? Couldn't arterial stiffness simply be a systemic response to the increased dynamic pressure induced during RT? An adaptation necessary to accommodate the stress?

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Why didn't I think of that? :)

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Originally Posted by Jonathon Sullivan

And so on. You see, the interpretation and significance of any particular biomarker depends heavily on context, and many can be markers for both health or disease, depending on that context. (Have you ever considered that the slight decreases in arterial compliance reported in the literature might be a salutary adaptation to resistance training, even though it's unhealthy in sedentary or diseased populations?)

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Reviving this thread since the new "study" I've just read the abstract of concludes that "endurance" training appears to be better for metabolic, and consequently cardiovascular, health, than lifting heavy weights. I'd be interested to see the experts on this forum comment upon (and maybe identify the weaknesses of) this study:
Associations of Aerobic Fitness and Maximal Muscular Strength With Metabolites in Young Men | Cardiology | JAMA Network Open | JAMA Network

Full disclosure, it was the New York Times that drew my attention to the study.

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Originally Posted by Amy-in-PHX

Reviving this thread since the new "study" I've just read the abstract of concludes that "endurance" training appears to be better for metabolic, and consequently cardiovascular, health, than lifting heavy weights. I'd be interested to see the experts on this forum comment upon (and maybe identify the weaknesses of) this study:
Associations of Aerobic Fitness and Maximal Muscular Strength With Metabolites in Young Men | Cardiology | JAMA Network Open | JAMA Network

Full disclosure, it was the New York Times that drew my attention to the study.

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How do they define and measure 'muscular strength'?

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Originally Posted by RJPinAZ

How do they define and measure 'muscular strength'?

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"The maximal isometric leg extension was measured using a dynamometer, as a test of maximal strength.29 The repeatability has been reported to be high in maximal isometric strength tests (r, 0.98; coefficient of variation, 4.1%).30 Additional details are presented in eAppendix 1 in the Supplement."

BTW, it also seems likely that there would be significant overlap between people with high muscular strength and people with high aerobic fitness. I'm not good enough at reading this kind of study to tell how they tried to separate out these factors, but their conclusion seems to be that aerobic fitness is "better," somehow, at optimizing the various markers in blood that are believed to impact cardiovascular health.

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Originally Posted by Amy-in-PHX

Reviving this thread since the new "study" I've just read the abstract of concludes that "endurance" training appears to be better for metabolic, and consequently cardiovascular, health, than lifting heavy weights. I'd be interested to see the experts on this forum comment upon (and maybe identify the weaknesses of) this study:
Associations of Aerobic Fitness and Maximal Muscular Strength With Metabolites in Young Men | Cardiology | JAMA Network Open | JAMA Network

Full disclosure, it was the New York Times that drew my attention to the study.

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(I didn't read the study)
That part I high-lighted above almost reads "cardio training is better for cardio". Which is kind of a no brainer.
I hope this study didn't cost someone a lot of money to run.

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Originally Posted by Amy-in-PHX

Reviving this thread since the new "study" I've just read the abstract of concludes that "endurance" training appears to be better for metabolic, and consequently cardiovascular, health, than lifting heavy weights. I'd be interested to see the experts on this forum comment upon (and maybe identify the weaknesses of) this study:
Associations of Aerobic Fitness and Maximal Muscular Strength With Metabolites in Young Men | Cardiology | JAMA Network Open | JAMA Network

Full disclosure, it was the New York Times that drew my attention to the study.

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This study reflects much of what is wrong with medical science in general, and exercise and nutritional science to an even greater degree. The majority of the motivation to move a paper to publication comes from two groups:
1. Career research scientists with faculty appointments. They need to publish or perish, to get the next grant, make tenure, or otherwise advance or survive in the cutthroat world of academia. 2. A mixture of post-docs, PHD students, undergrad students padding their resumes, for graduate school, medical students padding their resumes for residency application, resident physicians meeting their institutional requirement to publish before graduation, and resident physicians padding their resumes for fellowship application and academic careers. Note that the longest time horizon most of the first group can tolerate is 7 years, with most needing to get something accepted for publication much sooner than that. The second group has a maximal time frame of about 4 years, most more like 1-2 years.

Contrast this to the time needed to collect meaningful cardiac outcomes for lifestyle interventions, which in a college age population is 4-7 decades, or approximately 20 times longer than the average researcher can afford to wait for definitive results. The collision of these two realities results in health science by proxy: "since we cannot actually measure cardiac outcomes in healthy populations and also continue to eat/pay the mortgage/save for retirement/reach the next stage in our chosen careers, we will instead measure lab values in healthy populations which are known to correlate with cardiac disease in sick populations". The problem is that no one knows what those values mean in healthy populations. Fortunately all serious research departments have a statistician, so the paper can be filled with p-values and r-squared coefficients showing that the finding is significant.

There are minor quibbles I could raise with confounding variables which were not uniform between groups. but the more important issue is that the study did not actually measure anything of proven clinical significance in the study population.

Rip and Sully (and others) -

Rip’s excellent 2017 article linked at the beginning of this conversation includes the phrase “assuming you are not a heart patient”.

My question is, if I AM a 51 yo heart patient (my cardiac calcium test showed plaque; when unmediated my blood pressure is roughly 160/110; family cardiac history; etc) would your recommendations change?

FWIW, I lift 3x/week, do cardio 2-3x/week, and see my cardiologist 2x/year. 5’9”, 195 lbs. I don’t much enjoy cardio but I’ll do as much as necessary to fend off death.

Thanks in advance.

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Originally Posted by Mark E. Hurling

Anyone who thinks strength training has no value in terms of cardiovascular effects can check the last few months of my log entries. I've been wearing my Polar heart rate monitor again and even with 3-5 minute rest intervals between sets, the results are plain to see.

Summary of yesterday's lifting session.

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Glad this has come up. I used my HRM as a gauge to caloric burn each training session. After all, a heart beat is a heartbeat and a minute is a minute. But, I was disabused of this notion by one of the Gurus at the StrengthCon I in April 2018. Guru said there are too many 'intervals' in a weight training session for the HRM to provide an accurate output number.

Dr. Sullivan, and Gurus, please comment. This is important stuff.

Ken