The Importance Of Cardio To Building Muscle

The importance of cardio to building muscle

Unfortunately, many people feel that cardiovascular training and building muscle are two polar opposites. And that doing cardio will inhibit one's ability to grow and might even eat way at our gains!

The truth is cardio and strength training have a very synergistic relationship when it comes to our overall health and it’s a lot easier to build muscle when we are in good health. This is true at any age but especially as we get older.

To illustrate this relationship between cardiovascular or aerobic training and resistance training, let’s look at a couple of health markers both types of exercise improve independent of the other.

If you are interested in losing body fat and adding muscle, please email me at 1shark1bite@gmail.com for information on my personal training services.

Check your testosterone levels from home. Just click this link http://trylgc.com/laurence and receive 20% off with code: LAURENCE20 I receive commissions on referrals to LetsGetChecked. I only recommend services I know and trust.

Facebook; https://www.facebook.com/Fit-and-50-5...

My Amazon page link; https://www.amazon.com/shop/fitand50

My Affiliate link to Lebert for their Equalizer bars and more; https://lebertfitness.com/?ref=hmkesu... and use the discount code FITAND50 you will receive 15% off your purchase

Both aerobic exercise and resistance training has been shown to lower blood pressure reducing the risk of heart disease and stroke. But combine the two and you get the best results.

They did a study on 69 adults between the ages of 45 to 74. These people didn’t have any serious medical conditions but did have elevated blood pressure or hypertension, they were overweight and sedentary.

They split the test subjects into 4 groups one being the control. Then a cardio group that did aerobic training 3 times a week for an hour. A weight training group that had 3 sessions a week again lasting for an hour. And finally, a combined group that did a half-hour of cardio and another half hour of weight training making for a total of 60 minutes 3 times a week.

The results being that after 8 weeks the combined cardio and weights group had the greatest decrease in blood pressure. With the same amount of time spent training as the other two groups.

Another health issue we often start to have as we get older is insulin insensitivity or insulin resistance which increases the risk of diabetes, high blood pressure, cardiovascular and kidney disease to name a few.

Now the number one way to improve insulin sensitivity is weight loss but exercise can help. They looked at a group of people with insulin resistance over a year and had some do diet alone, with others just doing exercise which was a combination of cardio, weight training, and a little bit of flexibility work. The last group did both the diet and the exercises.

This is where looking at longer studies when we can is important for the first 6 months the diet and exercise group’s insulin sensitivity improved by the same amount as the diet-only group, but at the 12-month mark the diet-only group had improved by 44% and the diet with exercise group had a 71% improvement.

To me, this is significant because if this was only a 6-month study they would have concluded exercise had no Additional benefit on insulin sensitivity over weight loss. Which in the long term is not the case at all.

Initially, cardiovascular training will have a greater effect on reducing insulin resistance, but over time as we build muscle this muscle will play a greater role with one cross-sectional study finding that along with every 10 percent increase in muscle mass to total body weight there was an 11 percent reduction in risk of insulin resistance

Now we are going to talk about a couple of things cardio does better than resistance training to help us build more muscle. The first one is artery health and the second one being capillary density. Improvement in these areas allows more blood, oxygen and nutrients to flow into the muscle and clears waste out. Improving muscle growth and recovery.

From a health standpoint improvements in our artery health and capillary density protects us from a heart attack, High blood pressure, diabetes and a decline in brain function.

Now to be clear a large amount of cardio is going to hurt your muscle growth. So if building muscle is your primary goal then you are going to want to emphasize resistance training only supplementing with shorter cardio sessions no longer than 20 to 30 minutes. 2 to 3 times a week and while high-intensity cardio has been shown to have less of a negative effect on muscle growth, you should choose a form of cardio you can fully recover from before your next resistance training session.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3835728/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23525435/
https://www.medpagetoday.org/clinical-context/type2diabetes/27816?vpass=1