Great news for anyone looking to take charge of their heart health: both cardio and weight training offer impressive benefits for your cholesterol, and together they create an even more powerful effect.

Professor Neil Smart, an Exercise and Sports Science expert at Australia's University of New England, led a comprehensive review published in Sports Medicine that revealed encouraging findings. Exercise lowered participants' LDL (bad cholesterol) by about 7 milligrams per deciliter, reduced artery-clogging vLDL by about 4 mg/dL, and decreased triglycerides by about 8 mg/dL on average. Even better, working out increased HDL (good cholesterol) by about 2 mg/dL.

While these numbers might seem modest at first glance, here's the truly exciting part: exercise can do something that medications and diet alone cannot. It can raise HDL cholesterol, which is often the trickiest marker to improve. This is wonderful news because virtually everyone with high levels of harmful lipids has low HDL, and it's comparatively harder to boost with medications like statins.

Cardio activities like walking, running, swimming, and cycling work their magic right away by burning triglycerides in your bloodstream as fuel. Over time, regular aerobic activity helps break down fats in your blood and actually reshapes LDL particles so they're less dangerous. George A. Kelley, a Research Professor at Boise State University, explains that exercise makes these particles more puffy and less dense, which means they contribute less to atherosclerosis.

On the HDL front, cardio can increase these helpful cholesterol levels by about 10 percent and improve their function, according to Dr. William E. Kraus, Professor of Medicine at Duke University. Exercise helps your body produce small HDL particles that are especially efficient at removing cholesterol before it forms dangerous plaques.

Weight training brings its own impressive benefits. Resistance training can raise HDL levels about as much as aerobic exercise does, and Professor Smart notes that the two work even better together. His theory is particularly fascinating: since HDL is protein-rich and weight lifting involves breaking down and repairing protein-rich muscle fibers, it makes perfect sense that HDL would respond well to this type of activity.

The Bright Side

The path forward is surprisingly achievable. To positively change your cholesterol, you need to burn about 1,000 to 1,200 calories during exercise per week. If you weigh 180 pounds and enjoy walking, five weekly 50-minute walks at a moderate pace will get you there. The flexibility is wonderful: you can do longer sessions at lower intensity or shorter ones at higher intensity, whatever fits your lifestyle.

Even better, adding just one more minute to each workout session could raise HDL by 2 mg/dL over about 12 weeks. Each extra weekly cardio workout reduced triglycerides by about 8 mg/dL in the studies reviewed.

For resistance training benefits, aim for two to three sessions per week. The combination of both types of exercise creates a complementary effect that gives your heart health the best possible support. You're not just fighting high cholesterol, you're building a stronger, healthier body that works better in every way.