"Cardio kills your gains." If you grew up lifting during the noughties and up until the last 3 years or so, that statement reared its head pretty often. It was also due to the faith in that statement that so many of us couldn’t do a set of leg presses or lunges past 15 reps with reasonable weight, without feeling like we’d run 800 meters. Cardio was something you associated with one of those Kenyans breaking records at marathons, and, while their physical feats were impressive, they didn’t look like the Austrian Oak.
“You’re telling me I can get bigger and stronger if I spend more time on the cross-trainer? You bite your tongue!” The aerobic system is pretty important. It’s our gas tank. A bigger gas tank will allow a car to drive further. Our bodies work very similarly. Neglecting it will hinder our ability to build muscle and get stronger. The reasons are quite simple. Better Recovery In and Out of the Gym With better endurance, you’ll be able to recover faster from tough sets so that you can maintain high effort in each set. This is important because simply hitting your volume of work isn’t enough, it needs to be matched with sufficient intensity for it to cause adaptations in the body that signal muscle growth and strength gains. A poor cardiovascular system means you won’t have enough juice to put into your sets, and you’ll also take longer to recover between sessions, which can impair your performance. Ability to Train Closer to Failure Training close to and occasionally hitting failure is necessary to grow. The problem is, sometimes failure isn’t at 8 or 10 reps before you’re really having to rely on your endurance, it’s at 20 or 30. Good luck getting there before your heart gives up if you’re not doing any sort of cardiovascular work. The perceived difficulty of those sets may be high, but the real difficulty for muscles will still be low because they’re let down by poor stamina. Better Nutrient Partitioning This just means our bodies are better at “telling” the food we eat where to go and get more nutrients out of it. Muscle growth and strength are part of performance. Performance nutrition requires a sufficient calorie intake and a calorie surplus (in the majority of cases). Surplus calories may not always be used by the body efficiently, which leaves gains on the table. Keeping some cardio in a training programme even when trying to gain size not only ensures a better appetite, it will also allow the body to get more from more. How much should we be doing? We don’t need to be doing this every day unless we like to. A couple of sessions of 20-40 mins per week to start off will have some benefits already, and then we can adjust as necessary from there. The main thing is to do some.
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