If you're looking to trim down, you may want to use weights in your workout. NY1's Health reporter Kafi Drexel filed the following report.

If you've fantasized about having abs like the ones pictured above, the best way to do it may be to make weights your friend. To get behind the washboard science, NY1 visited fitness impresario David Barton in his new Astor Place location, complete with hot fuschia lights that reflect a bit of his own rock star personality.

"Look better naked. Words to live by," says Barton, a former body builder who swears by the benefits of weight training.

"There is a belief out there that cardio trims you down, weights bulk you up," says Barton. "As an adult over the age of 25 or 30, you are losing half a pound of muscle a year and that muscle, that lean mass is your fat-burning, calorie-burning machinery. Because you are burning fewer calories, you gain body fat. So the average adult who is not exercising gains a half-pound of body fat a day."

Barton says the only way to counteract that is with strength training to keep up muscle mass. To get started, you may want to seriously consider getting guidance from a trainer.

Also, don't be afraid of machines, which Barton says may be a better option for beginners.

"Machines are great because there is a set path of motion," he says. "Using a dumbbell requires stabilizing the weight through a number of dimensions and with machines it is really like getting in there. It is a little more user-friendly."

While boosting cardio may give you some quick results, Barton says adding on weights may be the best for long term.

"Weights and the maintenance or addition of lean body fat or muscle is what is going to regulate the metabolism," he says. "It's a more potent regulator of the amount of body fat on your body than anything else, other than diet."

Barton believes that weight training will help achieve results, but you'd have to work overtime to look as bulky as him.

"The idea that somebody is going to wake up one day, that a 110-pound woman is going to go in the gym and start lifting weights and wake up looking like me is a very low order of probability," says Barton. "I lifted a lot of weights and ate a lot of food for 20 years to get this big."

He views his beefy body as his calling card.

"And I have to be this big. I am larger-than-life and I have to advertise my business with my muscles," he says.