Many people come to me asking, is cardio necessary when building muscle, and what type of cardio is the best? Some people claim that cardio is just waste of time and does not contribute any muscle growth..
But I can tell you, those guys are dead wrong!!
First, you should not completely eliminate the cardio from your bodybuilding routine! However, when building muscle mass, you should keep it as minimum as possible. I don’t know excat numbers, but it mostly depends of your metabolic rate and the amount of lean muscle mass.
But, if you want to stay ripped while building muscle, you need to combine high intensity cardio with weight training. At the same time, you need to take more control of your body’s permanent energy supply and carefully control your calorie expenditure.
To avoid burning muscle tissue, eat slowly digestive protein and carbs before cardio and quick protein with quick carb right after cardio.
My lean muscle secret: To maintain my ripped look while gaining muscle, I rather increase the amount of cardio and burn additional calories through exercising than decreasing the calorie intake from food. I could still keep up the positive caloric balance. I just slightly increase the caloric intake in proportion to physical activity.
How much cardio?
If you want to gain muscle, a good rule of thumb is to perform cardio workouts 1-3 times a week. Using the right equipment when doing this kind of workout will help you a lot. You can find the best functional fitness equipment here. This improves your vital capacity and helps muscle building while keeping bodyfat levels in check.
It is more efficient to maintain your bodyfat levels by increasing the amount of calorie you burn through an additional cardio exercise than decreasing your calorie intake.
You can can start off by doing 2 x 30-60min sessions per week, and then slowly increase the amount of cardio sessions. In order to burn a substantial amount of fat, the optimal duration of continual cardio workout for most bodytypes would be at least 30min.
If you own superior genetics and have a super high metabolism, 3 x 20-30min of moderate aerobic workouts per week is all your need. This amount of workout will help to contribute your muscle building workouts.
Cardio for warm-up
Before you start a heavy workout, you must first prepare your muscle for heavy lifting. 5 min of light cardio workout will do the work.
In addition to increasing your body’s core temperature, it also warms up your arms and legs so that they are ready to take on the onslaught of pumping iron without being prone to injury.
You can chose from any form of cardio such as running, spot jogging, using a stair climber or elliptical trainer, or cycling.
Your heart rate increases during a cardio session, resulting in adequate blood being pumped throughout your body, and this prepares your body for a weight training session.