fatlossandmusclebuilding Blog

It is a much debated question, should you do cardio when you are trying to build muscle?

Some people claim that you should stay completely away from cardio if you are trying to gain muscle, some say that doing cardio whilst trying to gain muscle, but who is right?!

I think that firstly the following points must be considered:-

1. Are your cardio sessions planned around your resistance training, so as to still allow adequate rest for your muscle groups. For example if you train your legs on a Monday, you shouldn’t be running on a Tuesday. Your legs won’t be getting enough rest, and this may lead to over training.
2. To build muscle you must be overfeed, in other words consuming more calories than you are using up. You will have to allow for the fact that cardio burns up calories (energy), so allowance must be made in your diet to make up the burnt off calories.
3. Do you struggle to put on muscle? If you are someone who finds it hard to put on muscle, then it may pay to leave out the cardio and concentrate on the resistance training aspect of training. Cardio will not build up muscle, it is the resistance training that will do that.

So in short my answer would be if you can fit in cardio without overtraining, and you are able to consume the amount of calories that you need to build muscle then it is fine to carry on with cardio training. If you are finding it hard to gain weight, then it is a good idea to reduce or even eliminate your cardio training while in a muscle building phase. When you have reached your target weight, or have reached the end of your muscle building phase, you can add back in your cardio as normal.  

Tags: Muscle building, muscle growth, muscles

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 5:28 pm and is filed under General, Muscle Building Training, Muscle building. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.