Cardio plus weights tops the table for weight loss in students

Overweight and obesity are increasingly common among university students, making this group a pressing public health concern in its own right. Yet the practical question a student — or anyone planning a training programme — actually faces is not whether exercise helps, but which type of exercise helps most for which outcome. Head-to-head trials comparing every modality are rare, so the relative merits of HIIT, resistance training, aerobic exercise and combined programmes for body composition have remained insufficiently characterised. A network meta-analysis can rank all four against each other using the full web of available trial comparisons.

The researchers systematically searched for randomised controlled trials published up to 1 July 2025 via the Data Knowledge Service Platform, ultimately including 39 RCTs with 2,585 overweight or obese university students. The four interventions compared were high-intensity interval training (HIIT), resistance exercise, aerobic exercise, and combined aerobic-plus-resistance exercise. Outcomes covered body mass index, body fat percentage, body weight, waist circumference, hip circumference and body fat mass, with analyses run in RevMan 5.3 and Stata 16.

No single modality won across the board. Combined aerobic-plus-resistance training emerged as the most effective intervention for improving BMI, body weight and body fat mass (mean difference 2.57, 95% CI 1.82-3.32). Aerobic exercise proved most effective for reducing waist circumference (MD 8.44, 95% CI 1.16-15.72), while resistance exercise showed superior efficacy for hip circumference (MD 4.78, 95% CI 1.97-7.59). HIIT delivered the greatest improvement in body fat percentage (MD 4.05, 95% CI 1.05-7.05). Each modality, in other words, had a measure on which it led the field.

The finding that different exercise modes excel at different body-composition outcomes fits with the broader exercise literature, where combined training frequently performs well for overall weight-related measures and HIIT shows strength on fat percentage. What this analysis adds is a direct ranking within a single, clearly defined population — overweight and obese university students — where such comparative evidence had been lacking. Open questions include whether these rankings hold in older or less uniform populations, and how programme duration, intensity and adherence shaped the results across the included trials.

If your goal is a particular body-composition outcome, this analysis is a reason to think the choice of training style is not interchangeable: pooled trial evidence in young adults linked combined cardio-plus-weights programmes with the best overall changes in BMI, weight and fat mass, and HIIT with the largest drop in body-fat percentage. The population studied was university students with overweight or obesity, so the rankings may translate imperfectly to other groups. It is a useful map of trade-offs rather than a verdict that one modality is best for everyone.