HOW TO USE CARDIO TO BUILD MUSCLE
Many guys fear cardio as if every minute spent performing it means a muscle and strength loss. Some bodybuilder types bash it simply because they don’t like doing it.
While it’s clearly evident that excessive cardio causes muscle loss (just look at any marathon runner), moderate amounts of regular cardio can help you build more muscle over time.
Let’s look at how this works.
CARDIO AND MUSCLE RECOVERY
As you know, intense exercise causes damage to muscle fibers, which must then be repaired. This damage is the likely primary cause of the soreness that you feel the day or two following a workout, known as delayed onset muscle soreness, or DOMS.
Repairing the damage is a complex process that is partly regulated by two simple factors: the quantity of “raw materials” needed for repair that are brought to the damaged muscle over time and the speed at which waste products are removed.
Well, cardio can help your body repair muscle damage more quickly because it increases blood flow to various areas of the body. This type of “active recovery” delivers more “raw materials” to the muscles for use and removes the waste products, which results in an all-around quicker recovery period.
It’s worth noting, however, that these benefits are primarily seen in the legs because most forms of cardio don’t involve the upper body. If you want to boost whole-body recovery, then you would need to do something that gets your upper body working, like a rowing machine, or using your arms to pump on the elliptical machine.
CARDIO AND YOUR METABOLISM
In our collective dietary fantasy, all nutrients eaten would be sucked into the muscles and either absorbed or burned off and none would result in fat storage, and when we restricted our calories for fat loss, all of our energy needs would be met by burning only fat, not muscle.
The reality, however, is that our bodies do these things to varying degrees. Some people’s bodies store less fat when they overeat than others’, and some can get away with larger calorie deficits without losing muscle.
Genetics and anabolic hormone levels are the major players here, which means there just isn’t much we can do about how our bodies innately respond to calorie surpluses or deficits.
All is not lost if you’re not a part of the genetic elite, however, because an important factor in what your body does with the food you eat is insulin sensitivity, and this is something we can positively affect.
As discussed earlier in the book, retaining insulin sensitivity is highly beneficial when you’re eating a surplus of calories to build muscle, whereas insulin resistance inhibits muscle growth and promotes fat storage.
This is where cardio comes in because it improves insulin sensitivity and does so in a dose-dependent manner (meaning the more you do, the more benefits you get).
In this way, doing cardio can help your muscles better absorb the nutrients you eat, which can mean more muscle growth and less fat storage over time.
CARDIO AND CONDITIONING
A common issue in the bodybuilding world is the dramatic reduction in cardiovascular fitness when focusing only on bulking and heavy weightlifting for months on end.
Building one’s cardio conditioning back up is not only uncomfortable, but going from doing absolutely no cardio to doing several sessions per week in addition to putting yourself in a calorie deficit places a lot of stress on the body. This added stress makes weight loss physically and psychologically tougher, and it can even accelerate muscle loss.
By keeping regular cardio in year-round, however, you can maintain your metabolic conditioning and prevent the systemic “shell shock” that many people experience during the beginning of a cut.
It’s also common for people who have bulked for months without cardio to experience an initial lag in weight loss. I’ve yet to find a satisfactory explanation for why this occurs, but it could be related to the fact that exercise improves the body’s ability to metabolize fat, and thus regular cardio may optimize and preserve this mechanism.
THE BOTTOM LINE
The bottom line is that moderate amounts of cardio most definitely don’t impair muscle growth and may even accelerate it, and cardio confers other health benefits as well. I recommend that you make cardio a regular part of your routine, whether you’re cutting, bulking, or maintaining.
The muscle-related benefits of cardio are especially true if the exercise closely imitates the motions used in exercises performed to build muscle, like cycling or rowing.
These benefits were demonstrated in a particularly interesting study conducted by researchers at Stephen F. Austin State University.
What they found is that the type of cardio done had a profound effect on the subjects’ ability to gain strength and size in their weightlifting. The subjects who did running and walking for their cardio gained significantly less strength and size than those who cycled.
A similar effect was also seen in a study conducted by researchers at the University of Wisconsin.
They separated 30 untrained men into two groups and had one follow a weight training program three days per week and the other do the same plus 50 minutes of cycling. After 10 weeks, they found that the men who cycled in addition to training with weights gained more thigh muscle than the weights-only group.
Personally, I’ve been recumbent cycling two to four times per week for more than a year now, and I’ve enjoyed tremendous improvements in my cardiovascular endurance and resting heart rate. While I can’t conclusively say that I’ve built more leg muscle from it, I did notice an initial increase in leg strength as they had to adapt to the new stimulus.
THE BEST TYPE OF CARDIO FOR LOSING FAT, NOT MUSCLE
Cardio machines often show pretty graphs indicating where your heart rate should be for “fat burning” versus “cardiovascular training.”
You calculate this magical heart rate by subtracting your age from 200 and multiplying this number by 0.6. If you keep your heart rate at this number, you’re often told, you’ll be in the “fat burning zone.”
Well, there’s only a slight kernel of truth here.
You do burn both fat and carbohydrates when you exercise, and the proportion varies with the intensity of exercise. A very low-intensity activity like walking taps mainly into fat stores, whereas high-intensity sprints pull much more heavily from carbohydrate stores. At about 60 percent of maximum exertion, your body gets about half of its energy from carbohydrate stores and half from fat stores (which is why many “experts” claim that you should work in the range of 60 to 70 percent of maximum exertion).
Based on the above, you might think that I’m arguing for steady-state cardio (cardio that involves steadily keeping your effort and heartbeat in a certain range), but there’s more to consider.
The first issue is total calories burned while exercising. If you walk off 100 calories, 85 of which come from fat stores, that isn’t as effective as spending that time in a moderate run that burns off 200 calories with 100 coming from fat. And that, in turn, isn’t as effective as spending that time doing sprint intervals that burn off 500 calories with 150 coming from fat.
Sprinting’s benefits extend beyond the calories burned while exercising, though. A study conducted by scientists at the University of Western Ontario gives us insight into just how much more effective high-intensity cardio is.
Researchers had 10 men and 10 women train three times per week, with one group doing between four and six 30-second treadmill sprints (with four minutes of rest in between each), and the other group doing 30 to 60 minutes of steady-state cardio (running on the treadmill at the “magical fat-loss zone” of 65 percent VO2 max).
The results: after six weeks of training, the subjects doing the intervals had lost significantly more body fat. Yes, four to six 30-second sprints burn more fat than 60 minutes of incline treadmill walking.
These findings are supported by several other studies, such as those conducted by researchers at Laval University, East Tennessee State University, Baylor College of Medicine, and the University of New South Wales, which have all shown that shorter, high-intensity cardio sessions result in greater fat loss over time than longer, low-intensity sessions.
Although the exact mechanisms of how high-intensity cardio trumps steady-state cardio for fat-loss purposes aren’t fully understood yet, scientists have isolated quite a few of the factors, which include the following:
• increased resting metabolic rate for more than 24 hours after exercise,
• improved insulin sensitivity in the muscles,
• higher levels of fat oxidation in the muscles,
• significant spikes in growth hormone levels (which aid in fat loss) and catecholamine levels (chemicals your body produces to directly induce fat mobilization), and
• post-exercise appetite suppression.
High-intensity interval training not only burns more fat in less time than steady-state cardio, but it also preserves muscular size and improves performance as well.
Research has shown that the longer your cardio sessions are, the more they impair strength and hypertrophy.
Thus, keeping your cardio sessions short is important when we’re talking about maximizing your gains in the weight room and preserving your muscle. Only high-intensity interval training allows you to do this and burn enough fat to make it worthwhile.
I like the recumbent bike for my cardio, and here’s how I do it:
1. I start my workout with 2 to 3 minutes of low-intensity warm-up on the lowest resistance.
2. I then bump the resistance up several notches to give me something to pedal against but not so much that my quads get fried in just one bout, and I pedal as fast as possible for 60 seconds. If you’re new to HIIT, you may need to start with 30- to 45-second sprints.
3. I then reduce the resistance to its slowest setting and pedal at a moderate pace for the same amount of time as my high-intensity interval (60 seconds). If you’re new to HIIT, you may need to extend this rest period to 1.5 to 2 times your high-intensity intervals (if you sprint for 30 seconds, you may need 45 to 60 seconds of recovery).
4. I then repeat this cycle of all-out and recovery intervals for 25 to 30 minutes.
5. I finish with a 2- to 3-minute cool-down at a low intensity.
That’s it. I’ll bring my iPad and read or watch something and the time flies by.
If you’d like to do a different form of HIIT cardio, such as rowing, sprinting, swimming, jump roping, or anything else that permits it, go for it. You can apply the same simple principles: relatively short bursts of maximum effort that spike your heart rate followed by low-intensity recovery periods that bring it down to normal levels.
If you want to include some steady-state cardio in your routine, that’s fine as well. Just know that it’s not as effective for fat loss purposes and that if you do too much of it, you can impair muscle growth. Personally, I wouldn’t do more than 45 to 60 minutes of steady-state cardio in one session, and in terms of weekly frequency, we’ll talk about that in a minute.
THE BEST TIME TO DO CARDIO
When you do your cardio in relation to your weightlifting matters.
Researchers from RMIT University worked with well-trained athletes in 2009 and found that “combining resistance exercise and cardio in the same session may disrupt genes for anabolism.” 31 In laymen’s terms, they found that combining endurance and resistance training sends “mixed signals” to the muscles. Cardio before the resistance training suppressed anabolic hormones such as IGF-1 and MGF, and cardio after resistance training increased muscle tissue breakdown.
Several other studies, such as those conducted by researchers from the Children’s National Medical Center, the Waikato Institute of Technology, and the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland, came to the same conclusions: training for both endurance and strength simultaneously impairs your gains on both fronts.32 Training purely for strength or purely for endurance in a workout is far superior.
Cardio before weightlifting also saps your energy and makes it much harder to train heavy, which in turn inhibits your muscle growth.
Therefore, I recommend that you separate your weightlifting and cardio sessions by at least a few hours if at all possible. Personally, I lift early in the morning and do my cardio after work, before dinner.
If there’s no way that you can split up your cardio and weightlifting, do your weight training first, as cardio first will drain energy that you’ll want for your lifting. While this arrangement isn’t ideal, it’s not a huge problem. You can still do well on the program.
If you can, I recommend having a protein shake after your weightlifting and before your cardio as this will help mitigate the muscle breakdown.
HOW OFTEN YOU SHOULD DO CARDIO
In terms of frequency, here’s how I do it:
• When I’m bulking, I do two 25-minute HIIT sessions per week.
• When I’m cutting, I do three to five 25-minute HIIT sessions per week.
• When I’m maintaining, I do two to three 25-minute HIIT sessions per week.
• I never do more than five cardio sessions per week, as I’ve found my strength begins to drop off in the gym if I do.
Many people are shocked to learn that I do no more than 1.5 to 2 hours of cardio per week while cutting but am able to get to the 6 to 7 percent body fat range with ease. Well, the idea that you have to do a ton of cardio to get shredded is a complete myth. It’s not only unnecessary but unhealthy as well.
You don’t have to do cardio to lose fat, but if you want to get down to the 10 percent range or below, I can pretty much guarantee you’ll have to do at least two to three sessions per week.
If you’d like to stick with steady-state cardio or include it in your routine, stick with the frequency recommendations given above. You can mix and match modalities (HIIT vs low-intensity steady-state, or LISS) but I still wouldn’t do more than five sessions per week.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Congratulations! You’ve just learned the core principles of the Bigger Leaner Stronger training program. Chances are that this is a new approach to training for you, and if that’s the case, you should be excited.
Soon you’re going to be enjoying explosive muscle growth and rapid fat loss by doing relatively short, stimulating workouts that you look forward to every day and that get the kind of results other guys can only dream about.
You’re never going to burn yourself out with hours and hours of grueling cardio either. In fact, if you’re like me, you’ll come to enjoy your cardio sessions because they’ll noticeably improve your performance and overall health without eating up large chunks of your free time.
Next on the agenda is the discussion of the individual weightlifting exercises you’re going to be performing on the program. Carry on to find out!
Many guys fear cardio as if every minute spent performing it means a muscle and strength loss. Some bodybuilder types bash it simply because they don’t like doing it.
While it’s clearly evident that excessive cardio causes muscle loss (just look at any marathon runner), moderate amounts of regular cardio can help you build more muscle over time.
Let’s look at how this works.
CARDIO AND MUSCLE RECOVERY
As you know, intense exercise causes damage to muscle fibers, which must then be repaired. This damage is the likely primary cause of the soreness that you feel the day or two following a workout, known as delayed onset muscle soreness, or DOMS.
Repairing the damage is a complex process that is partly regulated by two simple factors: the quantity of “raw materials” needed for repair that are brought to the damaged muscle over time and the speed at which waste products are removed.
Well, cardio can help your body repair muscle damage more quickly because it increases blood flow to various areas of the body. This type of “active recovery” delivers more “raw materials” to the muscles for use and removes the waste products, which results in an all-around quicker recovery period.
It’s worth noting, however, that these benefits are primarily seen in the legs because most forms of cardio don’t involve the upper body. If you want to boost whole-body recovery, then you would need to do something that gets your upper body working, like a rowing machine, or using your arms to pump on the elliptical machine.
CARDIO AND YOUR METABOLISM
In our collective dietary fantasy, all nutrients eaten would be sucked into the muscles and either absorbed or burned off and none would result in fat storage, and when we restricted our calories for fat loss, all of our energy needs would be met by burning only fat, not muscle.
The reality, however, is that our bodies do these things to varying degrees. Some people’s bodies store less fat when they overeat than others’, and some can get away with larger calorie deficits without losing muscle.
Genetics and anabolic hormone levels are the major players here, which means there just isn’t much we can do about how our bodies innately respond to calorie surpluses or deficits.
All is not lost if you’re not a part of the genetic elite, however, because an important factor in what your body does with the food you eat is insulin sensitivity, and this is something we can positively affect.
As discussed earlier in the book, retaining insulin sensitivity is highly beneficial when you’re eating a surplus of calories to build muscle, whereas insulin resistance inhibits muscle growth and promotes fat storage.
This is where cardio comes in because it improves insulin sensitivity and does so in a dose-dependent manner (meaning the more you do, the more benefits you get).
In this way, doing cardio can help your muscles better absorb the nutrients you eat, which can mean more muscle growth and less fat storage over time.
CARDIO AND CONDITIONING
A common issue in the bodybuilding world is the dramatic reduction in cardiovascular fitness when focusing only on bulking and heavy weightlifting for months on end.
Building one’s cardio conditioning back up is not only uncomfortable, but going from doing absolutely no cardio to doing several sessions per week in addition to putting yourself in a calorie deficit places a lot of stress on the body. This added stress makes weight loss physically and psychologically tougher, and it can even accelerate muscle loss.
By keeping regular cardio in year-round, however, you can maintain your metabolic conditioning and prevent the systemic “shell shock” that many people experience during the beginning of a cut.
It’s also common for people who have bulked for months without cardio to experience an initial lag in weight loss. I’ve yet to find a satisfactory explanation for why this occurs, but it could be related to the fact that exercise improves the body’s ability to metabolize fat, and thus regular cardio may optimize and preserve this mechanism.
THE BOTTOM LINE
The bottom line is that moderate amounts of cardio most definitely don’t impair muscle growth and may even accelerate it, and cardio confers other health benefits as well. I recommend that you make cardio a regular part of your routine, whether you’re cutting, bulking, or maintaining.
The muscle-related benefits of cardio are especially true if the exercise closely imitates the motions used in exercises performed to build muscle, like cycling or rowing.
These benefits were demonstrated in a particularly interesting study conducted by researchers at Stephen F. Austin State University.
What they found is that the type of cardio done had a profound effect on the subjects’ ability to gain strength and size in their weightlifting. The subjects who did running and walking for their cardio gained significantly less strength and size than those who cycled.
A similar effect was also seen in a study conducted by researchers at the University of Wisconsin.
They separated 30 untrained men into two groups and had one follow a weight training program three days per week and the other do the same plus 50 minutes of cycling. After 10 weeks, they found that the men who cycled in addition to training with weights gained more thigh muscle than the weights-only group.
Personally, I’ve been recumbent cycling two to four times per week for more than a year now, and I’ve enjoyed tremendous improvements in my cardiovascular endurance and resting heart rate. While I can’t conclusively say that I’ve built more leg muscle from it, I did notice an initial increase in leg strength as they had to adapt to the new stimulus.
THE BEST TYPE OF CARDIO FOR LOSING FAT, NOT MUSCLE
Cardio machines often show pretty graphs indicating where your heart rate should be for “fat burning” versus “cardiovascular training.”
You calculate this magical heart rate by subtracting your age from 200 and multiplying this number by 0.6. If you keep your heart rate at this number, you’re often told, you’ll be in the “fat burning zone.”
Well, there’s only a slight kernel of truth here.
You do burn both fat and carbohydrates when you exercise, and the proportion varies with the intensity of exercise. A very low-intensity activity like walking taps mainly into fat stores, whereas high-intensity sprints pull much more heavily from carbohydrate stores. At about 60 percent of maximum exertion, your body gets about half of its energy from carbohydrate stores and half from fat stores (which is why many “experts” claim that you should work in the range of 60 to 70 percent of maximum exertion).
Based on the above, you might think that I’m arguing for steady-state cardio (cardio that involves steadily keeping your effort and heartbeat in a certain range), but there’s more to consider.
The first issue is total calories burned while exercising. If you walk off 100 calories, 85 of which come from fat stores, that isn’t as effective as spending that time in a moderate run that burns off 200 calories with 100 coming from fat. And that, in turn, isn’t as effective as spending that time doing sprint intervals that burn off 500 calories with 150 coming from fat.
Sprinting’s benefits extend beyond the calories burned while exercising, though. A study conducted by scientists at the University of Western Ontario gives us insight into just how much more effective high-intensity cardio is.
Researchers had 10 men and 10 women train three times per week, with one group doing between four and six 30-second treadmill sprints (with four minutes of rest in between each), and the other group doing 30 to 60 minutes of steady-state cardio (running on the treadmill at the “magical fat-loss zone” of 65 percent VO2 max).
The results: after six weeks of training, the subjects doing the intervals had lost significantly more body fat. Yes, four to six 30-second sprints burn more fat than 60 minutes of incline treadmill walking.
These findings are supported by several other studies, such as those conducted by researchers at Laval University, East Tennessee State University, Baylor College of Medicine, and the University of New South Wales, which have all shown that shorter, high-intensity cardio sessions result in greater fat loss over time than longer, low-intensity sessions.
Although the exact mechanisms of how high-intensity cardio trumps steady-state cardio for fat-loss purposes aren’t fully understood yet, scientists have isolated quite a few of the factors, which include the following:
• increased resting metabolic rate for more than 24 hours after exercise,
• improved insulin sensitivity in the muscles,
• higher levels of fat oxidation in the muscles,
• significant spikes in growth hormone levels (which aid in fat loss) and catecholamine levels (chemicals your body produces to directly induce fat mobilization), and
• post-exercise appetite suppression.
High-intensity interval training not only burns more fat in less time than steady-state cardio, but it also preserves muscular size and improves performance as well.
Research has shown that the longer your cardio sessions are, the more they impair strength and hypertrophy.
Thus, keeping your cardio sessions short is important when we’re talking about maximizing your gains in the weight room and preserving your muscle. Only high-intensity interval training allows you to do this and burn enough fat to make it worthwhile.
I like the recumbent bike for my cardio, and here’s how I do it:
1. I start my workout with 2 to 3 minutes of low-intensity warm-up on the lowest resistance.
2. I then bump the resistance up several notches to give me something to pedal against but not so much that my quads get fried in just one bout, and I pedal as fast as possible for 60 seconds. If you’re new to HIIT, you may need to start with 30- to 45-second sprints.
3. I then reduce the resistance to its slowest setting and pedal at a moderate pace for the same amount of time as my high-intensity interval (60 seconds). If you’re new to HIIT, you may need to extend this rest period to 1.5 to 2 times your high-intensity intervals (if you sprint for 30 seconds, you may need 45 to 60 seconds of recovery).
4. I then repeat this cycle of all-out and recovery intervals for 25 to 30 minutes.
5. I finish with a 2- to 3-minute cool-down at a low intensity.
That’s it. I’ll bring my iPad and read or watch something and the time flies by.
If you’d like to do a different form of HIIT cardio, such as rowing, sprinting, swimming, jump roping, or anything else that permits it, go for it. You can apply the same simple principles: relatively short bursts of maximum effort that spike your heart rate followed by low-intensity recovery periods that bring it down to normal levels.
If you want to include some steady-state cardio in your routine, that’s fine as well. Just know that it’s not as effective for fat loss purposes and that if you do too much of it, you can impair muscle growth. Personally, I wouldn’t do more than 45 to 60 minutes of steady-state cardio in one session, and in terms of weekly frequency, we’ll talk about that in a minute.
THE BEST TIME TO DO CARDIO
When you do your cardio in relation to your weightlifting matters.
Researchers from RMIT University worked with well-trained athletes in 2009 and found that “combining resistance exercise and cardio in the same session may disrupt genes for anabolism.” 31 In laymen’s terms, they found that combining endurance and resistance training sends “mixed signals” to the muscles. Cardio before the resistance training suppressed anabolic hormones such as IGF-1 and MGF, and cardio after resistance training increased muscle tissue breakdown.
Several other studies, such as those conducted by researchers from the Children’s National Medical Center, the Waikato Institute of Technology, and the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland, came to the same conclusions: training for both endurance and strength simultaneously impairs your gains on both fronts.32 Training purely for strength or purely for endurance in a workout is far superior.
Cardio before weightlifting also saps your energy and makes it much harder to train heavy, which in turn inhibits your muscle growth.
Therefore, I recommend that you separate your weightlifting and cardio sessions by at least a few hours if at all possible. Personally, I lift early in the morning and do my cardio after work, before dinner.
If there’s no way that you can split up your cardio and weightlifting, do your weight training first, as cardio first will drain energy that you’ll want for your lifting. While this arrangement isn’t ideal, it’s not a huge problem. You can still do well on the program.
If you can, I recommend having a protein shake after your weightlifting and before your cardio as this will help mitigate the muscle breakdown.
HOW OFTEN YOU SHOULD DO CARDIO
In terms of frequency, here’s how I do it:
• When I’m bulking, I do two 25-minute HIIT sessions per week.
• When I’m cutting, I do three to five 25-minute HIIT sessions per week.
• When I’m maintaining, I do two to three 25-minute HIIT sessions per week.
• I never do more than five cardio sessions per week, as I’ve found my strength begins to drop off in the gym if I do.
Many people are shocked to learn that I do no more than 1.5 to 2 hours of cardio per week while cutting but am able to get to the 6 to 7 percent body fat range with ease. Well, the idea that you have to do a ton of cardio to get shredded is a complete myth. It’s not only unnecessary but unhealthy as well.
You don’t have to do cardio to lose fat, but if you want to get down to the 10 percent range or below, I can pretty much guarantee you’ll have to do at least two to three sessions per week.
If you’d like to stick with steady-state cardio or include it in your routine, stick with the frequency recommendations given above. You can mix and match modalities (HIIT vs low-intensity steady-state, or LISS) but I still wouldn’t do more than five sessions per week.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Congratulations! You’ve just learned the core principles of the Bigger Leaner Stronger training program. Chances are that this is a new approach to training for you, and if that’s the case, you should be excited.
Soon you’re going to be enjoying explosive muscle growth and rapid fat loss by doing relatively short, stimulating workouts that you look forward to every day and that get the kind of results other guys can only dream about.
You’re never going to burn yourself out with hours and hours of grueling cardio either. In fact, if you’re like me, you’ll come to enjoy your cardio sessions because they’ll noticeably improve your performance and overall health without eating up large chunks of your free time.
Next on the agenda is the discussion of the individual weightlifting exercises you’re going to be performing on the program. Carry on to find out!
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