Take a break from the heart-pounding cardio and pick up those weights. "While aerobic exercise will maintain muscle, building new muscle is more effectively done if the muscle in question is exposed to higher resistance training," Daniel Vigil, MD, associate clinical professor of health sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and team physician for the UCLA Department of Intercollegiate Athletics, told POPSUGAR.
Take your thigh and calf muscles, for example. Dr. Vigil explained that running will maintain muscle strength, while bodyweight squats and lunges will build muscle. But squats and lunges using weights will stimulate the most muscle development. "The reason for these outcomes is because muscle fibres grow in direct response to how much that muscle is exposed to resistance," he said.