Good news: you probably don’t need to choose between cardio and strength training.
They aren’t competing versions of the same workout.
They train some different qualities, share some overlapping benefits and can work extremely well together.
So if you’ve ever wondered whether you should spend your limited exercise time walking, running, lifting weights, doing a fitness class, Pilates or somehow squeezing all of them into an already busy week, the better question isn’t:
“Which type of exercise is best?”
It’s:
“What does my body, my goal and my current week actually need?”
For one woman, adding strength training may be the missing piece.
For another, it might be cardiovascular fitness.
And for someone who has spent years believing every workout needs to be hard, sweaty and exhausting, the missing piece might actually be balance.
This is where thinking about exercise as a portfolio rather than a competition becomes useful.
Cardio vs Strength Training for Women: What’s the Difference?
Cardiovascular and strength training both challenge your body, but they don’t create exactly the same adaptations.
Cardio — or aerobic exercise — primarily challenges your cardiorespiratory system and your ability to sustain activity.
Depending on intensity, this might include:
- brisk walking
- running or jogging
- cycling
- swimming
- rowing
- dancing
- aerobic fitness classes
- and many sports or recreational activities.
Strength training primarily challenges your muscles to produce force against resistance.
That resistance might come from:
- dumbbells
- barbells
- kettlebells
- machines or cables
- resistance bands
- bodyweight
- or other forms of external resistance.
If you’re unsure what actually qualifies as resistance exercise, our guide to strength training for women explains the principles in more detail.
There is overlap between these categories.
A circuit class might challenge both your muscles and cardiovascular system. Walking steep hills requires muscular work. A demanding set of squats can certainly make your heart rate climb.
But an elevated heart rate during strength training doesn’t automatically make it equivalent to dedicated aerobic training, just as climbing a hill doesn’t necessarily provide the progressive resistance stimulus of a structured strength programme.
Overlap doesn’t make the adaptations identical.
What Is Cardio Actually Good For?
Cardio is sometimes reduced to one purpose:
burning calories.
That’s selling it remarkably short.
Aerobic exercise helps develop cardiorespiratory fitness — your body’s ability to take in, transport and use oxygen during sustained activity.
That can matter when you’re:
- walking uphill
- climbing stairs
- keeping up while travelling
- playing with children or grandchildren
- doing physical work
- participating in sport
- or simply wanting everyday movement to feel easier.
Cardio can also be enjoyable.
A walk with a friend counts.
A run because you love how you feel afterwards counts.
Dancing counts.
Swimming counts.
You don’t have to punish yourself on a treadmill for cardiovascular exercise to have value.
Cardio is training for your cardiovascular system, not repayment for something you ate.
What Is Strength Training Actually Good For?
Strength training gives your muscles a reason to adapt to resistance.
With appropriate programming and progression, it can improve muscular strength and contribute to maintaining or increasing muscle mass.
That becomes particularly relevant through adulthood because strength isn’t only something we use in a gym.
It’s what allows us to lift, carry, push, pull, get up, move objects and continue doing physical things independently.
Resistance exercise is also particularly relevant to musculoskeletal health, which is one reason current Australian physical activity recommendations include muscle-strengthening activities on at least two days each week.
And no, lifting something heavier than a tiny dumbbell doesn’t automatically make a woman dramatically muscular.
If that concern has held you back, read Will Strength Training Make Women Bulky?
Strength is something your body can use outside the workout.
Think of Exercise as a Portfolio, Not a Competition
This is one of the most useful ways I think about exercise programming.
Imagine your weekly movement as a portfolio.
Different activities contribute different things.
Strength training can contribute heavily towards muscular strength, muscle development and physical capability. If strength training is one of the pieces you want to add, the next question is often how much you actually need. Our guide to how often women should strength train looks at whether one, two, three or more sessions make sense depending on your goals, recovery and the rest of your exercise week.
Cardiovascular exercise can contribute heavily towards aerobic fitness and endurance.
Walking and general daily movement can help you remain active without every bout of movement needing to become a formal workout.
Pilates and other forms of movement can contribute additional challenges, movement experiences and qualities depending on how they’re programmed.
Rest and recovery aren’t failed workouts. They’re part of being able to adapt to training.
These aren’t five teams competing for your loyalty.
They’re tools.
And the useful question becomes:
What’s missing from your portfolio?
If you already walk most days but never challenge your muscles against progressively increasing resistance, another walk may not fill the same gap that strength training would.
If you lift weights several times each week but become breathless whenever you need to sustain activity, adding some aerobic work may be more useful than simply adding another lifting session.
Your starting point changes what deserves your next hour.
Which Is Better for Fat Loss: Cardio or Strength Training?
This question deserves a more accurate answer than either side of the fitness industry usually gives it.
Aerobic exercise can absolutely contribute to reductions in body fat.
We don’t need to pretend cardio somehow stops working because strength training has become popular.
Strength training also has an important role, particularly because it provides a stimulus to maintain or develop lean tissue.
And combining resistance and aerobic training can be effective too.
A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis comparing aerobic, resistance and combined exercise found that aerobic training tended to produce greater reductions in absolute fat mass than resistance training in interventions lasting at least 10 weeks, while resistance training was more favourable for preserving fat-free mass.
The combined approach provided another useful option rather than suggesting women need to select one side.
But exercise is only one component influencing changes in body weight and body composition.
Nutrition, total activity, sleep, recovery, individual biology and the ability to maintain a routine all matter.
So I wouldn’t choose your entire exercise programme based on whichever workout appears to burn the most calories in 45 minutes.
A calorie counter doesn’t know what physical qualities you’re trying to keep.
Which Is Better for Changing Body Composition?
Again, it depends what you mean by “better”.
Body composition refers broadly to the different tissues that make up your body rather than simply the number you see on a scale.
If preserving or developing muscle matters to you, resistance training deserves particular attention.
If reducing body fat is a goal, aerobic exercise can be useful too.
And these things can coexist.
For many women, the more useful goal isn’t simply:
“How can I weigh less?”
It might be:
“How can I be stronger, fitter and maintain useful muscle while also working towards the body composition I prefer?”
That’s a different programming question.
Body weight and body composition aren’t interchangeable.
Is Cardio Bad for Muscle Growth?
No — not in the simplistic way you may have heard online.
There has long been discussion in exercise science about an “interference effect”, where endurance and resistance training performed together could potentially compromise some strength or muscle adaptations.
That question matters particularly when someone is trying to maximise a very specific performance outcome.
But it has often been exaggerated into:
“Don’t do cardio or you’ll lose your gains.”
That’s not a useful message for the average woman who wants to be both strong and fit.
A systematic review and meta-analysis of concurrent aerobic and strength training found that combining the two did not compromise maximal strength or whole-muscle hypertrophy compared with resistance training alone.
There was more nuance around explosive strength, particularly when both modes were performed within the same session.
More recently, a 2026 umbrella review of 17 meta-analyses and 144 individual studies found that concurrent training improved aerobic capacity compared with resistance training alone, while strength, power and hypertrophy outcomes were broadly comparable.
That’s encouraging if you’re not training for an elite power competition and simply want a body capable of doing more than one thing.
For most recreational exercisers, cardio and strength can coexist very well.
Some workouts deliberately combine resistance training and cardiovascular conditioning rather than treating them as completely separate categories. Functional fitness is one example: depending on how it is programmed, a session can develop strength, muscular endurance, movement skills and cardiovascular fitness within the same broader training approach.
Does Strength Training Count as Cardio?
Sometimes strength training can feel very cardiovascular.
Do a demanding set of squats or move through a fast-paced circuit and your heart rate may climb considerably.
But feeling breathless isn’t the only thing that defines aerobic training.
Strength training and cardio are programmed differently because they’re generally trying to emphasise different adaptations.
A circuit containing resistance exercises with limited rest may provide both muscular and cardiovascular challenges.
That can be useful.
But if improving aerobic fitness is an important goal, it can still make sense to include activity specifically programmed to develop that quality.
Making strength training faster isn’t always the same as making it better cardio.
And making every strength exercise breathless can sometimes reduce the resistance or quality of work you’re able to perform.
Do You Need HIIT?
No.
High-intensity interval training can be an effective way to train, but it isn’t a compulsory ingredient in a woman’s exercise programme.
You can improve cardiovascular fitness through other forms of aerobic exercise.
You also don’t need every session to feel maximal for it to count.
This is particularly important for women who have absorbed the message that a workout is only worthwhile if they’re drenched in sweat, completely exhausted or unable to repeat it the following day.
Hard training has a place.
So does moderate training.
So does walking.
So does recovery.
Intensity is a programming variable, not a measure of your work ethic.
Cardio or Strength Training After 40: Which Matters More?
This is another place where women are often given unnecessarily dramatic advice.
Turning 40 doesn’t require you to abandon cardio and spend the rest of your life lifting weights.
Nor should fear of becoming muscular stop you from doing resistance exercise.
Both strength and cardiovascular fitness remain relevant through midlife and beyond.
Strength training deserves particular consideration because maintaining strength and muscle becomes increasingly valuable as we age.
Cardiovascular fitness doesn’t suddenly stop mattering because you’ve entered perimenopause either.
The goal isn’t to select one adaptation and neglect everything else.
It’s to build a programme that supports the life you want your body to keep participating in.
Age can change your priorities without reducing you to an age category.
Should You Do Cardio or Weights First?
If you’re doing both in the same workout, the answer depends partly on what you’re prioritising.
If strength performance is your main goal, doing your resistance work while you’re relatively fresh often makes practical sense.
If you’re specifically training for an endurance event, there may be situations where the aerobic work deserves priority.
For a general exerciser, however, the precise order is probably less important than fitness content sometimes makes it sound.
The 2026 umbrella review of concurrent training found no significant overall effect of training sequence, although there were trends suggesting resistance training before endurance work may favour some strength-related outcomes.
A simple rule is:
Put the thing you most want to perform well at while you’re freshest.
Then remember that consistency across months matters far more than obsessing over whether Tuesday’s bike ride should happen 20 minutes before or after your dumbbells.
Can You Do Cardio and Strength Training on the Same Day?
Yes.
For many recreational exercisers, combining them on the same day is simply practical.
You might complete a strength workout and finish with some moderate cardio.
A group fitness class may deliberately contain elements of both.
Or you might walk, cycle or jog earlier in the day and strength train later.
If you’re training at a high level for specific strength, power, hypertrophy or endurance outcomes, the details of session order, intensity, recovery and separation become more important.
But a woman trying to fit exercise around work, family and life doesn’t necessarily need an athlete’s training schedule.
A theoretically perfect programme you can’t fit into your life isn’t particularly perfect.
The Three-Hour Exercise Budget
Let’s make this practical.
Imagine you’ve looked at your week and realistically have about three hours available for structured exercise.
Not seven.
Not the imaginary 90 minutes every morning that social media seems to think everybody has.
Three hours.
How should you spend them?
The temptation is to search for the perfect formula:
90 minutes of weights + 60 minutes of cardio + 30 minutes of something else.
But your current starting point matters.
If you already walk briskly for substantial periods most days but do no resistance training, using more of your structured exercise budget for strength may make sense.
If you strength train consistently but rarely do anything that challenges your aerobic fitness, allocating some time to cardio may improve the balance.
If you’re completely inactive, the first priority may simply be building a manageable routine rather than optimising every minute.
If you love Pilates and it keeps you consistently active, removing it to create somebody else’s theoretically perfect week may be a terrible trade.
Don’t ask how everybody should spend three hours.
Ask what would add the most value to yours.
What Should You Prioritise? Six Real-Life Scenarios
1. “I walk all the time. Isn’t that enough?”
Walking is valuable movement and there is no reason to dismiss it because it isn’t performed in a gym.
If you walk regularly, you’ve already built something useful into your life.
But walking and progressive resistance training aren’t identical stimuli.
If strength training is absent from your week, that may be the area worth adding rather than replacing your walking.
2. “I lift weights but I hate cardio.”
You don’t have to become a runner.
Cardio is a category, not an activity.
You might prefer cycling, swimming, rowing, dancing, hiking, brisk walking, fitness classes or another sustained activity.
Find the cardiovascular work you’re most willing to repeat.
3. “I only do cardio because I want to lose weight.”
You don’t necessarily need to stop doing cardio.
If you enjoy it, keep it.
But consider what your current programme is doing to maintain or develop muscular strength and lean tissue too.
Rather than asking cardio to do everything, you can give different training modes different jobs.
4. “I love Pilates. Do I need anything else?”
First, don’t throw away something you genuinely enjoy because somebody online says it doesn’t count.
Pilates can provide a meaningful training stimulus, and how much it develops particular physical qualities depends on the exercises, resistance, progression and programme.
You can also add external resistance to some Pilates exercises. Our guide to Pilates with weights explains what adding dumbbells changes, whether light weights are enough and how weighted Pilates compares with Pilates performed without weights.
The useful question is what your current Pilates practice provides and what may still be missing.
We’ve explored that in detail in Can Pilates Replace Weight Training?
You can enjoy Pilates and still include dedicated strength or cardiovascular work where appropriate.
Fitness doesn’t require exclusivity.
5. “I’m over 40 and completely confused by what I’m supposed to do.”
You aren’t required to follow every new midlife fitness rule appearing online.
Start with the fundamentals.
Can you progressively challenge your muscles?
Do you include movement that develops cardiovascular fitness?
Are you generally active?
Can you recover from what you’re doing?
Do you enjoy enough of it to have a realistic chance of continuing?
Those questions are much more useful than trying to find a magical “women over 40” workout.
6. “I only have three workouts a week.”
Then let’s stop pretending you have six.
Three well-chosen sessions can contain a lot of useful training.
Depending on your goals and current activity, that might mean dedicated strength sessions plus cardiovascular activity elsewhere.
It might mean classes that combine different elements.
It might mean two strength-focused sessions and one cardio-focused session while walking regularly outside them.
There isn’t one compulsory arrangement.
Your programme needs to fit the week you actually have.
What If Walking Is Your Main Exercise?
Keep walking.
Seriously.
We don’t need to turn every useful habit into something inadequate simply because another form of exercise also has benefits.
Walking can be accessible, social, enjoyable and easy to integrate into everyday life.
But if walking is your only form of exercise, ask whether you’re also giving your muscles an adequate resistance stimulus.
You don’t need to choose:
walking or strength.
You can keep the habit that’s already working and add what it doesn’t provide.
Add the missing piece. Don’t automatically dismantle the good pieces.
What If You Hate Traditional Strength Training?
Strength training doesn’t require you to walk into a large gym alone and know exactly what to do.
Some women love that environment.
Others don’t.
Resistance training can happen through small-group classes, personal training, home programmes, machines, free weights, resistance bands and other appropriately programmed options.
The principles matter more than whether your workout looks like somebody else’s.
If you’re new to a class environment, our beginner’s guide to group fitness explains what to expect and why you don’t need to “get fit first”.
What If You Hate Cardio?
First, work out what you actually hate.
Do you hate cardio?
Or do you hate running?
Do you hate exercise that leaves you gasping?
Do you hate treadmills?
Do you hate exercising alone?
Do you hate being told that a workout doesn’t count unless it hurts?
Those aren’t the same problem.
You may discover that you enjoy walking outdoors, cycling, dancing, swimming or a class even though you’ve spent years declaring that you “hate cardio”.
Sometimes you don’t hate a category of exercise. You hate the version of it you’ve been given.
Your Favourite Exercise Is Allowed to Stay
This matters.
If you’ve finally found something that gets you moving consistently and makes you feel good, don’t abandon it because an online argument declared another training style superior.
Enjoyment isn’t an irrelevant extra.
It’s difficult for an exercise programme to help you over the long term if you continually avoid doing it.
That doesn’t mean enjoyment is the only consideration.
Sometimes we benefit from doing things that aren’t our favourite.
But good programming can often keep what you love while strategically adding what you need.
If consistency has been difficult for you in the past, read How Long Does It Take to Make Exercise a Habit?
The best programme isn’t the one that wins an argument on the internet. It’s the one that gives your body what it needs in a form you’re willing and able to keep doing.
What About Bone Health?
Women often hear that exercise is important for bone health, particularly through midlife and later adulthood.
That’s true, but “exercise” is again too broad to treat every activity as interchangeable.
Resistance exercise can provide mechanical loading to the musculoskeletal system, while some weight-bearing and impact activities may provide additional bone-loading stimuli.
The appropriate type and intensity of exercise will vary considerably between individuals, particularly where osteoporosis, previous fractures, pain or other medical considerations are involved.
So I wouldn’t tell every woman that walking alone is enough for bone health, nor would I tell every woman to immediately start jumping or lifting very heavy weights.
Bone responds to loading, but appropriate loading still needs to be appropriate for the person.
Do You Need to Exercise Every Day?
No.
You can move every day if you enjoy it, but structured hard training every single day isn’t a requirement for a useful exercise programme.
The current Australian movement recommendations for adults encourage a combination of physical activity across the week, including muscle-strengthening activities on at least two days.
That’s a weekly picture.
It doesn’t mean every day needs to contain a formal workout.
Your programme also has to leave room for recovery and the rest of your life.
Good Programming Isn’t About Choosing a Team
This is where the cardio-versus-strength debate becomes much more interesting from a programming perspective.
A good programme isn’t simply a collection of exercises.
When planning training, we can consider:
- the goal
- the person’s current ability
- exercise selection
- training mode
- frequency
- intensity
- volume
- progression
- recovery
- available time
- preferences
- and what else they’re already doing.
Changing one of those variables can change what the programme asks of the person.
That’s why randomly adding more workouts isn’t necessarily better programming.
If someone already has plenty of aerobic activity but little strength work, adding resistance training may create more balance.
If someone is lifting frequently while doing almost no sustained aerobic work, adding cardio may make sense.
If someone is exhausted, inconsistent and trying to squeeze nine different fitness goals into four available hours, adding another session may be exactly the wrong answer.
A programme isn’t good because it contains more exercise. It’s good because the pieces have a reason for being there.
What Should a Balanced Week of Exercise Look Like?
There isn’t one perfect week I can give every woman reading this.
And I think pretending there is would undermine everything we’ve just discussed.
A woman who works a physically demanding job doesn’t start from the same place as someone who sits for most of the day.
A woman training for a running event doesn’t have the same priorities as someone primarily interested in maintaining strength.
A beginner doesn’t need the same programme as an experienced exerciser.
A woman who loves four fitness classes each week has different practical considerations from someone who has 90 minutes available across the entire week.
Instead, build around a few questions:
- Am I doing something that challenges my cardiovascular system?
- Am I doing something that progressively challenges my muscles?
- Am I generally moving rather than relying only on formal workouts?
- Am I recovering adequately?
- Does this programme reflect my actual goals?
- Can I realistically keep doing it?
If the answer to one of those questions is consistently no, you’ve found somewhere worth looking more closely.
Cardio vs Strength Training for Women: The Bottom Line
Cardio and strength training aren’t rivals.
They give your body different — and sometimes overlapping — reasons to adapt.
Cardiovascular training can help develop aerobic fitness and endurance.
Strength training can help develop muscular strength and support muscle mass.
Combining them can allow you to develop both qualities, and contemporary research doesn’t support the idea that ordinary amounts of cardio automatically destroy strength or muscle development.
You don’t need to become a runner because someone told you cardio is best.
You don’t need to give up the cardio you love because someone told you weights are superior.
You don’t need to abandon Pilates, walking or the fitness class that finally made exercise enjoyable.
And you don’t need seven free days every week to build a useful programme.
Keep the pieces that are serving you.
Identify what’s missing.
Then programme with a purpose.
Because the real question was never cardio versus strength.
It’s what combination helps you become strong, fit and capable enough for the life you actually want to live.
Find Your Way to Move at Bodi Boutique
At Bodi Boutique, movement doesn’t have to fit into one box.
Small-group fitness, strength-based training, Pilates and Reformer Pilates can provide different ways to challenge your body, build confidence and find movement you genuinely enjoy.
The aim isn’t to make everybody train the same way.
It’s to help you understand what you’re doing, progressively develop the qualities that matter to you and build movement into a life you actually want to live.
Explore Group Fitness at Bodi Boutique →
Explore Pilates & Reformer Pilates →
Research & Further Reading
- Maximizing Adaptations in Concurrent Training: An Umbrella Review of Meta-Analyses (2026)
- Schumann et al. — Compatibility of Concurrent Aerobic and Strength Training for Skeletal Muscle Size and Function: An Updated Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
- The Effects of Concurrent Aerobic and Strength Training on Muscle Fiber Hypertrophy: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
- Australian Government — Physical Activity and Exercise Recommendations for Adults
About the author
Jazz — Bodi Boutique
Jazz is a qualified fitness and Pilates instructor and the owner of Bodi Boutique, a small-group fitness, Pilates, Reformer Pilates and wellness studio in Millmerran, Queensland.
Through Bodi Boutique, Jazz works with women across different ages, fitness levels and exercise backgrounds, with a focus on making movement approachable, progressive and enjoyable.
