Your heart does not care whether you love the treadmill or the squat rack, because decades of cardiology research say it wants both.
Quick Take
- Heart researchers now say combining aerobic exercise and strength training protects the heart better than either one alone
- The American Heart Association updated its guidance in 2023, calling resistance training safe and effective for heart health
- Combined workouts lower blood pressure, body fat, and resting heart rate more than cardio by itself
- Federally funded research found strength training added to cardio further improves heart disease risk in adults with obesity
Decades Of Heart Guidance Point To One Combined Answer
Cardiologists have spent years testing whether lifting weights or logging miles does more for the heart. The answer keeps landing in the same place. A 2006 American Heart Association scientific statement found no reason to abandon guidelines calling for moderate resistance training alongside aerobic exercise, not instead of it. That combined approach has held up as the gold standard in cardiac prevention ever since.
A Harvard-tracked study backed this up with hard numbers. People who paired aerobic exercise with strength-based moves cut their cardiovascular risk just as much as an all-aerobic routine. Strength training alone, without any cardio mixed in, did not match those results over the one-year study period. The lesson is not that lifting weights is weak medicine. It is that weights work best as a partner to cardio, not a replacement for it.
Why Two Different Workouts Fix Two Different Problems
Aerobic exercise and resistance training push the heart through different channels. Brisk walking, cycling, and swimming train the body to move oxygen more efficiently through the blood. Lifting weights builds muscle and boosts the tiny energy factories inside cells called mitochondria. Neither pathway fully covers what the other one does, which is why relying on just one leaves real health benefits on the table.
The American Heart Association made this official in a 2023 update, stating that resistance training is a safe and effective way to improve heart health in people with and without existing heart disease. That statement mattered because for years, strength training got treated as a bonus activity for building muscle, not a core piece of heart protection. The update moved it into the main prescription alongside cardio.
What The Combined Training Numbers Actually Show
Researchers pooling data across trials found combined training lowered systolic blood pressure by nearly 18 points and cut resting heart rate by more than 8 beats per minute, alongside meaningful drops in body weight and body fat percentage. Those are not small tweaks. They are the kind of shifts doctors look for when trying to keep patients off blood pressure medication or out of the cardiac ward entirely.
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° Improves heart health & strengthens the cardiovascular system.
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Resistance training carries its own standalone punch, too. One large analysis found that even one hour or less of strength training per week was linked to roughly 40 to 70 percent lower odds of a cardiovascular event, independent of how much cardio someone also did. That finding matters for anyone who assumes a quick weight session does not count unless it is paired with a long run. It counts on its own, and it counts more when stacked with cardio.
How Much Combined Training Actually Moves The Needle
Federally funded research out of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute found that adults with overweight or obesity who combined strength training with cardio saw their cardiovascular disease risk profile improve, matching or beating cardio done alone. Strength training by itself did not produce the same composite improvement, reinforcing that the combination, not either piece in isolation, delivers the fullest protection.
Real-world guidance built from this research suggests roughly two and a half to four hours per week of combined cardio and strength work for solid heart benefits, with at least two dedicated strength sessions folded into that total. That is not an extreme daily grind. It is a realistic split between walking, cycling, or swimming days and two weight-focused sessions, which lines up with what most major heart guidelines now recommend for adults of any age.
Sources:
mindbodygreen.com, health.harvard.edu, pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, crtonline.org, journals.plos.org
