How much cardio do I have to do? How many sessions? How long? What style? What machine? How intense? Do I need a heart rate monitor? Why are intervals better? or are they not? Do I need to do double cardio? I want to grow muscle can I do cardio anyway? Will muscle break down muscle? How do I stay lean and gain muscle at the same time? And all those questions come to mind in less than 30 seconds because they are the most common questions I get. For us who want to be lean and have muscle mass more than average, we do cardio primarily for achieving a higher caloric expenditure per day, secondarily for health benefits. The more cardio you do, the more calories you burn, but if you do too much you rob your strength and your body releases too much cortisol which can have an adverse effect on muscle mass if its released in excess. All training releases cortisol. The longer the training the higher the cortisol release. The more intense the training the higher the cortisol release too. Training short and with low intensity is not a choice if you want to build muscle since you must train hard to overload your body so it adapts to the stress and grows. In order to get super lean you most likely need to do more cardio than for health benefits. If you usually do none its common practice to start out with a few sessions per week and add as time goes by. You can add intensity, duration, frequency etc. People who have on and off seasons usually cut back a lot on cardio (if not totally) during the muscle building off season and add it in when its time to lean down. Those who do this usually gain lots more weight than they wish because they 1) eat more than needed 2) train less cardio. If you are naturally lean and dont even have to diet really strict there is absolutely no reason to do more cardio than needed to maintain health. This is usually considered being about 3 intense workouts per week. If you do more than needed it can impact your muscle- and strength gains. For those who have very little muscle, are skinny, but have relatively high body fat percentage (skinny fat), this is quite a catch 22. You must pay attention to how cardio affects your energy levels. You can not afford losing your force and power on cardio when you really need to lift some weight to tone up! For skinny fat people it takes a little while to get somewhere with your body. This is due to the fact you dont have enough muscle to diet down and you dont either have a fast metabolism which enables you to eat a lot to gain muscle without packing on pounds of fat as well. For those who have bodies that seem to run happily on one calorie a day (like me), there are two options: either do lots of cardio to stay or get really cut OR settle for a less ripped look except for occasional photo shoots, competitions or what have you. This body type gains muscle relatively easy, you recover faster than most people, your base strength when starting out was stronger than average. The negative part is you need to bust your butt a lot more on a daily basis even though you eat super clean and watch everything that goes down your mouth. Many people say they get lean with minimum amount of cardio. So be it. But before you believe them, try to figure out where they are coming from and what THEY perceive as LEAN. What is bloated for one is ripped for another. What is skinny for one, is toned for another. Fat for one person might be curvy for someone else. With this being said, cardio depends on who you are, what goals you have, your metabolism, your gender, your diet, your hormones, your capacity to train hard and your capacity to recover and repeat over and over without breaking down. For ideas on how to make your cardio effective, check out my ebooks CARDIO FD STYLE volume 1 and 2 PLUS the ultimate Cardio guide Cardio 4 Leanness. fighterdiet/fd-cardio-for-leanness
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 18:40:55 +0000
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