For most of my fitness life I have been focused on weights, bulking, and bodybuilding. In the many years that I have been on this planet, for the younger years of mine, I found this more rewarding because you can see the results in the mirror. That is something that I found very gratifying in my 20's and 30's.
As I started to get into my 30's though, I started noticing things that I would consider to be detriments of this single-focused style of fitness. Namely, and I mean no offense here, but you are not actually in very good shape. I would notice this when I would do sport activities with my friends playing soccer or throwing a ball around in a park or just pick up softball. I would "gas out" a lot faster than friends of mine that were half my size, yet compared to them side-by-side, I kind of looked like a mutant.
I think that for anyone that exercises regularly they already know this but big muscle mass doesn't normally transition into good speed and endurance when it comes to anything cardio related. In fact, in the years I did bodybuilding and weights, I normally wouldn't do ANY cardio.
I am neither one of the above things but the image does come from a fun article about exactly that and as you would expect, the runner ends up winning the contest even though their exercises were both involving strength and speed.
Getting back to me: In my 40's I started to kind of lament the fact that while I was strong, and I did look pretty good, my strength wasn't particularly useful and I was getting concerned about the fact that I would get winded almost immediately during any sort of cardio. It was during a 5km charity run that I had to walk half of that really showed the truth to me. When I turned up with my grizzled arms weighing in at nearly 100 kg people kind of expected me to be leading the pack. The opposite was the case and I was near the back. I was absolutely beat by the end of it too while a lot of the other people thought this was a casual day out. I was thinking about how they would get decimated in my weight stacks but then I started to think about which of these things is more practical for everyday health. Strength is important, I am not going to say that it isn't... but I think it is pretty obvious that cardiovascular health is far more important, especially in the long run.
In the past 4 months or so, I have changed my diet and my entire exercise regimen so that I am only doing weights once or twice a week and I do cardio on almost all other days.
I thought that I would be disappointed in the muscle-mass loss, which was always going to happen, but some good side-effects happened as well.
For one thing, my face shrunk, if you can imagine what I am talking about here. When I started losing mass, my face stopped being so "beefcake." I guess this comes along with not doing cardio and grinding out intense weight-lifting sessions. Now my face is more slim and when I look in the mirror I like it more. I do look less menacing but since I am a law-abiding person in my 40's I wasn't going to be getting into any fights anyway.
My head basically got back down to the same size it was when I was in my 20s and was still involved in college sports.
I have also dropped a bunch of weight and I can only attribute that to the fact that while I am using my legs more, I am not bulking my chest, back, and arms anymore. I still lift but not anywhere near the intensity that I used to. While I used to struggle to stay under 95kg, I now kind of fear that I am getting a bit too close to 80. I honestly never thought I would see this "weight class" again in my life but I guess that is just the way it goes.
One really big benefit is that I am sweating less perhaps because my body is more accustomed to doing cardio. This was always a potentially embarrassing problem for me and needless to say, I prefer not breaking out in a sweat in normal situations like walking outdoors.
Honestly, I would rather not drop below 80kg if possible, but at the moment I am quite enjoying becoming faster and getting involved in these races that I wouldn't have dreamed of doing back when weights were my only form of exercise.
Which is better? Well, I don't really know. I like both of them. But for me, as I've gotten older I start to feel more and more like the bodybuilding side of things is a young man's game and older people like me are much more likely to end up hurt or end up with a limited range of motion or chronic pain because they tried to stay "young" longer than they probably should have.
My guns have diminished in size, but my belly has shrunk as well and obviously, I prefer to not have one of those.
I realize that this is probably a one-way street though and it wasn't a decision that I took lightly. If you are older and you decide to step off of the bodybuilding circuit, getting back into it will be very difficult if not impossible.
In the meantime though I am really happy to see gains in other ways such as progressing in run times rather than a personal best on squats. Speaking of which, my squats have remained about the same and this is probably because my legs are actually stronger from all the running and cycling. It is also are more useful strength because it is for a motion that a human is far more likely to actually encounter in life.
So while I close the book on being muscular, I am opening a new one and at least up to this point I don't have any regrets. There is always something new to aspire to.