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Weights as good as a run?

 •  • by Paul Ingraham
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Weekly nuggets of pain science news and insight, usually 100-300 words, with the occasional longer post. The blog is the “director’s commentary” on the core content of PainScience.com: a library of major articles and books about common painful problems and popular treatments. See the blog archives or updates for the whole site.

What if it was just as good for your aerobic fitness to lift weights as to run? Here’s a paper that says it probably is. The authors have a bias favouring this theory, and there’s no real evidence about it yet, but it’s plausible and they make several perfectly reasonable points about the basic exercise biology. At the very least, it does firmly support the idea that building strength is better for general fitness than most people realize (which is all I’m really after). More detail in the bibliography:

“Resistance Training to Momentary Muscular Failure Improves Cardiovascular Fitness in Humans: A Review of Acute Physiological Responses and Chronic Physiological Adaptations”
Steele et al. Journal of Exercise Physiology. Volume 15, Number 3. Jun 2012.

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