Can strength training improve cardiopulmonary function?

The answer is actually not that black and white - it depends on which strength training mode you choose. If the training arrangement is correct, it can really improve your performance. If you follow the traditional hypertrophy or extreme weight training method, the help to your heart and lungs will be almost negligible.

Akai, my former muscle friend who went to the gym with me, has been practicing split training for four years. He rotates the chest, shoulders, back, legs and arms every day. Each set is basically 8 to 12 times to failure, and the rest time between sets is two minutes or more. When we chat with him, he always says that his physical fitness is good. As a result, the company organized a fun sports meeting last year, and he climbed He was holding a weight-bearing relay on a six-story building halfway and was gasping for breath while holding on to the wall. Later, he took a physical test and found that his maximum oxygen uptake was only 41, which was not much different from his colleagues who sat in the office every day and did not exercise. This kind of low-frequency, long-interval pure muscle-building strength training does not touch the effective stimulation threshold of the heart and lungs.

But if you change the training mode, the effect will be completely different. I was preparing to participate in a local amateur physical fitness competition a few months ago, and specifically added strength circuit training twice a week. It didn’t require too complicated movements, just 15 kettlebell swings, 20-meter weight-bearing lunges, and 12 dumbbell shoulder presses. I did the three movements in a row without resting, and I didn’t rest until I finished a full set. I rested for 1 minute and did 6 groups in a row. In the second half of each exercise, my heart rate soared to over 170. The pounding feeling in my chest was exactly the same as running the last few hundred meters of a 5-kilometer run. I persisted for two months and then measured my maximum oxygen uptake. It rose directly from 46 to 53. This is a real improvement in cardiopulmonary function.

In fact, there have been different opinions on this point in the academic community. Some studies believe that only by continuously maintaining the heart rate at 60% to 80% of the maximum heart rate and doing steady-state aerobics for more than 20 minutes can the myocardial pumping capacity and cardiopulmonary reserve be truly improved. Strength training is intermittent even if the heart rate is increased. What is more improved is muscle tolerance and the temporary stress capacity of the heart and lungs, which is not an essential increase in cardiopulmonary function.； However, recent studies have shown that as long as the myocardium can receive sufficient contraction stimulation, whether it is steady state or intermittent mode, it can have an improvement effect. Especially for people with a large body weight and old knee injuries who are unable to do running, jumping and aerobic, this kind of low-impact cycle strength training is much more friendly than running.

In fact, for us ordinary fitness people, there is no need to worry about the academic definition. If you go to the gym every day to practice strength and don’t want to spend extra time doing aerobics, you can shorten the set rest time to 30 to 45 seconds once or twice a week, or string together several non-conflicting body movements into a cycle, and do cardiopulmonary training at the same time.； If your purpose of training strength is to hit a heavy weight and break a PR, there is no need to take rest time for cardiopulmonary compression, which will affect the training effect. If you want to take time alone for cardiopulmonary and cardiopulmonary compression, you can just swim or ride a bike. Do whatever is comfortable for you.