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Comment by m463 | Hacker News Reader

We've already figured out that aerobic exercise increases our cognitive abilities

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerobic_exercise#Neurobiologic...

Even though weight training isn't aerobic, couldn't it still increase our state of fitness?

Weight training is as much neurological stimulation as it is muscular. In fact, most of the fast gains a new lifter makes are due to learning to recruit motor units, which is to say training the nervous system. As any long time lifter can tell you, putting on muscle mass naturally takes a long time. The question is does stimulating motor neurons have knock on effects for the rest of the CNS? It's plausible that it does, but with some brief searching I'm not finding any compelling research that it does or doesn't.

> As any long time lifter can tell you, putting on muscle mass naturally takes a long time.

I don't agree with this. It's generally easy and straightforward to put mass fast: do hypertrophy, sleep 8+ hours a day, eat 2g protein per kg of body weight. That's all it takes. You'll see results very quickly, even with subpar training.

Learning new motor patterns (especially firing many muscles/full body at once), improving tendon strength, potentially increasing muscle density, improving physical awareness (say, handstand, or anything inverted, or anything with balance, or splits/pancake/perfect shoulder mobility), cardiovascular fitness - all extremely difficult to achieve (compared to just getting muscle mass).

Unless you're doing singles, a significant amount of energy is being delivered aerobically (I can't find the study atm, but I vaguely remember numbers around 50-70%). The longer you go, the higher the contribution by your aerobic system. It's a different stimulus from an hour of steady-state, of course, and it might be closer to HIIT than jogging. As for the benefits, there's this https://www.uab.edu/news/research/item/10251-weightlifting-c...

I started running (very) seriously only recently.

I can tell you for a fact that weight training will not significantly improve aerobic fitness. However, it will improve it up somewhat.

Just an example, you will never run 5km under 20 minutes just by weight training. But you can run 5km on the first try (say.. ~30 minutes) if you are into weight training (so your cardiovascular fitness is okay-ish, it's just not great).

Almost the same exact thing happened to me, as someone in supreme physical shape.

Long story short: you get great results in the things that you directly train; some things overlap, but the overlaps are never significant.

> Even though weight training isn't aerobic

It's never been clear to me what "aerobic" really means. Heavy or many-repped squat or deadlift sets will raise your heart rate plenty, and get you out of breath.

The difference shows up as you lengthen the session. Aerobic exercise is efficient for long exercise sessions where the goal is to build up general endurance, because it's not inherently time-constrained like anaerobic exercise is.

It means that the majority of your energy is being provided by the aerobic metabolic pathway. Raising your heart rate doesn't mean it's aerobic. There will always be a contribution from the aerobic pathway, but if the instantaneous demands are too high then anaerobic pathways provide most of the power.

Intuitively, the pathway that's providing most of the power is the pathway that gets the most training effect.

Weight training does use the aerobic system when you're not lifting heavy weights. As for the state of fitness, there have been studies about weight loss due to lifting heavy weights.

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