Today is Christmas, and many of us are no doubt feeling a stretch on our waistlines after indulging a little (or a lot) in holiday treats. Though it may feel a little early to start thinking about those New Year’s resolutions, a new study may offer some sage advice: compared with aerobic activities, daily weight training is more effective in keeping abdominal fat at bay.

Share on Pinterest You may want to head toward the weights section at your gym in early January; researchers say daily weight training is more effective than aerobic exercise at keeping abdominal fat away.

The first thing many people do when they enter the gym at the beginning of January is to step on a treadmill, but the new study – published in the journal Obesity – suggests we may want to veer toward the weights section.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) note that a wide variety of factors play a role in obesity, making it a “complex health issue to address.”

Though body weight is a result of our genes, metabolism, environment and culture, obesity results from an energy imbalance – simply put: when we eat too many calories and do not get enough exercise.

However, because behavior and environment play a large role in obesity, the CDC note that these are the greatest areas for prevention and treatment.

Lead study author Rania Mekary, from the Department of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), speaks of the importance of a healthy waist circumference:

“Because aging is associated with sarcopenia, the loss of skeletal muscle mass, relying on body weight alone is insufficient for the study of healthy aging. Measuring waist circumferences is a better indicator of healthy body composition among older adults.”

Because previous studies have focused on a specific population of participants – for example, those who were overweight or had type 2 diabetes – for short amounts of time, yielding mixed results, Mekary and her team used a large sample of healthy men, with a wide range of body mass indexes (BMIs), over a long period of time.