so confused

[MellowGAman]

Ok to the serious lifters on here... I been doing the whole strength 3 days a week and cardio 2 days a week.

I am half way through the book "new rules to lifting" and basically it says to my understanding that doing the strength 3 days a week and cardio 2 is not going to build my muscle, that I should stay away from the hard cardio and just do a light 20 min run on those days, or try and do it the same day with my strength

thoughts??

 

[[Focus]]

Disclaimer: I suppose I'm in no way what you could call a serious lifter..if your evaluation of serious is # of years weight training.

Well, if your goal is pure muscle gain with no focus on anything else, sure..limiting your cardio is a good idea, as cardio expends calories, and the idea of gaining weight is to take in more calories than you consume.

However, as I remember reading that your goal is fat loss..you could even increase your cardio. Ideally, most of your calorie deficit should come from increased exercise (I prefer to call it aerobic training, rather than cardio, cardio doesn't mean anything -_-). Once you slim down to the bodyfat % you want, while having maintained most of your fat kid muscle you may want to begin bulking to add a little more to your frame, and that's when you'd want to limit your cardio somewhat.

For example, my focus is fat loss and I do a full body weight training session twice a week, while doing 40-45 minutes of 60% exertion aerobic training (I like cycling ) every day I don't train.

My 2 cents. ^_^

 

[dswithers]

The current thinking on cardio and fat loss is that cardio, especially Steady State cardio is not the best way to cut body fat, in fact it may actually be deterimental to reducing body fat in many individuals. Do some reading on T-Nation, there are a lot of articles there that explain the theories better than I can.

 

[[Focus]]

True. I've seen a lot of pontificating back and forth on the issue and I decided to settle it in the simplest manner possible: by observing my visceral reaction.

In my case, steady state cardio fairly often feels the best to me, and is producing good results thus far, so it's what I go with.

There's lots of support for either. You might try one or both and see how it works for you. The fact is, imo, doing either is better than doing nothing or very little if your goal is fat loss. I wouldn't do HIIT more than 3 times a week, though.

 

[AJP]

If your goal is to build muscle then there shouldn't be much "hard cardio." I'm not sure if you're goal is just building muscle, or fat loss as well, if it is fat loss then you're not going to be building muscle because you'll (or you should be) be in a caloric deficit.