Cardio: Does it hinder muscle growth?

[01dragonslayer]

All right. Facebook Q and A. Troy Guillory asked a very good question. He was asking, doing steady state cardio around your weight training session if the adenosine monophosphate kinase the amp K promotion would defeat the mTOR response from your weight training or mechanical force resistance training session that you just did. So there are studies I believe that do show that it does compete and it could hinder the mTOR response, which is going to ignite protein synthetic response and all that awesome stuff after your training. So I would definitely try as much as possible to spread apart your steady state cardio away from your weight training. Well, I've done both and it was a little bit foolish in my earlier years whenever I was doing contest preps as a teen and then a little bit after that is that I would do my cardio after my weight training because I needed to get my double session in and the way my work schedule was, I had to do it, or at least I thought I had to do it.

I really didn't need that much cardio to begin with back then but I wanted to push. So I would always do your steady state cardio upon waking if you can. I think that's a good time to just get it over with. Get your endorphins going, get your mental clarity going, get your day started. Do that and then segregate that from your weight training session, which maybe is in the evening or late afternoon, maybe a four hour gap, what have you, or you could of course, which is my favorite, is do high intensity interval training, cardio or HIT post-training because you're still doing some form of resistance training from the quadricep work that you're doing. Hopefully you're doing 22nd, 15 second or 32nd all out sprints and you're probably only going to do those for 8, 10, 12, 15 minutes max, you're in and you're out, so that would probably be okay and not hinder the mTOR response.

But if you're going to do a full 35, 45 an hour of cardio afterwards, I don't like that. I'd rather someone get repleted, get their amino acids back in their body, the protein powder, get replenished and get the recovery process started. So I would definitely keep cardio in the equation in the off season but I would definitely get it away from weight training. I believe Dorian Yates was an advocate of that just by natural instincts, without even seeing a study he just instinctively knew that he didn't want to dig into his recovery time with aerobic capacity. It just changes energy substrates, it changes everything, flips the script on your physiology. So in my opinion guys, I would definitely segregate them.