Trainer's Blog

Cardio will not make you muscular and it will not make you lean, which is the combination of low body fat and noticeable muscularity. It can, on the other hand, make you look like an anorexic or make you look flabby and soft, if you do enough of it or do nothing but.

Now, I made a gross generalization just now in saying that cardio will not make you lean. Let me explain further. Cardio will not make you lean if a) you do it at a medium pace, as in jogging or aerobics, or b) you do way too much of it without also doing weight-lifting to somewhat off-set the muscle loss.

I’ll explain “a” first. The problem with medium pace cardio is that it burns muscle. I’ll use running as the prime example of medium-pace cardio. Running burns fat and muscle indiscriminately because you’re body wants to become as efficient as possible at traveling long distances at a medium pace, and the way for it to do so is to weigh less, and since muscle weighs more than fat, the quickest way to weigh less is to burn muscle off.

That’s not a good thing if your goal is to have a good-looking physique. What that’s going to do is make you look soft, or, if you do it to an extreme extent, make you look gaunt. Average people, and by that I mean non-athletes, just don’t have any muscle to spare, so losing it little by little over time can not only be unhealthy, it can also make your physique look unimpressive. That is why I don’t recommend running...

But fear not, there is a simple answer: intensity and the lack thereof. Cardio can be an effective supplement to your training. If  the goal is to be lean, you must either do high-intensity cardio or low-intensity cardio as well as weight-lifting.

High-intensity cardio is similar to weightlifting, and the body responds to it in a similar way, by getting stronger or faster. This is a good thing, as improving performance makes you look better! Also, high-intensity cardio forces the body to adapt in a more favorable way than it does to medium pace cardio; to sprint faster your body needs to become stronger, and this leads to some muscle gain in the muscles being used, but more importantly it leads to no muscle loss! Examples of high-intensity cardio include sprinting, walking intervals on an inclined treadmill and circuit training with weights.

Low-intensity cardio is walking or riding a bike at a conversational pace, as you can carry on a conversation while doing it. The good thing about low-intensity cardio is that it too does not burn muscle, or at least a lot less than medium pace cardio does. This is because walking does not cause an adaptation to occur, your body does not need to change drastically to become more efficient at walking. It just needs energy, which it will get primarily from fat.

The final word on cardio is that it has its place as a supplement to your weight lifting and not as the only form of training you do - so if you’re gonna run,...

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