Victoria Beckham, 48, swaps cardio for weights, here's why

It’s a common myth that in order to stay lean you need to be hot on it with cardio. There are actually many benefits from working out with weights and it’s a form of training that 48-year-old Victoria Beckham uses five or six days a week as she ditches aerobic workouts for the barbell.

You might be reading this and thinking it’s too late to learn how to exercise with weight-based exercises such as how to deadlift with dumbbells. However, former pop star Victoria Beckham has only discovered a love for weight lifting in her late 40s, giving Sporty Spice a run for her money.

It’s fair to say that Beckham has always enjoyed working out and staying in shape but this has typically been in the form of cardio and using the Tracy Anderson method, which is all about training smaller muscle groups over larger ones (with bodyweight or light forces of resistance) to create a slim and toned physique without bulking. 

But you don’t need to avoid weights if you want to slim down or just maintain a lean muscle. In fact, it’s a really efficient way to burn calories, and it's a great way to maintain muscle tissue and strength as you get older. Beckham herself has replaced cardio with lots of squats every morning as well as lifting weights five or six times a week.

It's not just her famous football player husband, David Beckham, who has kept up his fitness levels over the years. David's Instagram post below shows Victoria showing him how strong her core is during a plank contest between the couple. 

She explained why she now loves weight training in a recent interview with Grazia magazine, “I’ve always been a bit scared of weights, but it turns out I love them…It’s good to switch things up and keep your body guessing. I’ve got so much more muscle tone now.”

Fitness and diet trends are always coming and going. Similarly, people's perceptions of body shapes and what does and doesn’t look healthy are gradually progressing. Beckham’s career began in the 90s and continues today, meaning she has lived through a lot of these changing perceptions. 

“It’s an old-fashioned attitude, wanting to be really thin. I think women today want to look healthy, and curvy. They want to have some boobs – and a bum,” she told Grazia.

It’s certainly refreshing to hear words like this from a well-known figure in the limelight with a history of modeling on runways and featuring on the cover of Vogue.  

Another big reason why Beckham adopted this new style of training is down to the fact she stopped gaining results from her usual training sessions. Her personal trainer, Bobby Rich, shared with Women’s Health that regardless of spending over an hour at a time working out, she was ‘purely maintaining her fitness levels rather than improving in other meaningful ways’.

Rich wanted to show her that short sessions as small as 35-minutes can create more benefits than a 90-minute session. According to research published in the journal of Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism, Rich isn’t wrong with this theory. The researchers found that strength training can lead to gains and improved results in as little as one hour per week. 

If you’re looking to build more strength and lean muscle across your body and save some time then it’s worthwhile investing in some of the best adjustable dumbbells. These save you paying for a monthly gym membership and will allow you to work out with both light and heavy weight from one device.