How Much Cardio Is Needed When Building Muscle

You likely already know that cardio and weight training are opposite activities. Cardio training has a tendency to break down the muscle tissues while weight training will serve to build up muscle tissues over the long run.

As such, it only makes sense that when trying to optimize the amount of muscle you are able to build, you should not be performing a great deal of cardio at the same time.

If you do this, you will likely just be mediocre with both your cardio performance and your weight lifting performance. If you want to be the best at something, you need to focus on it.

Now, that said, this does not mean you should avoid cardio entirely for the whole duration of your muscle building efforts. Cardio can serve to enhance the results you see because it will first, keep your in good enough shape so that you do not get winded while you are doing your weight lifting workouts, second, enhance the fat burning enzymes in the body, thus helping you gain more muscle mass rather than fat mass, and third, help to increase the amount of blood flow to the muscle tissues, essentially enhancing the recovery rate you experience.

Since you cannot go back into the gym for another workout until your muscles are fully recovered and how much muscle you are able to build is quite dependant on weight lifting session frequency, it should be obvious that this is going to be advantageous.

So with this, many people ask themselves how much cardio is enough? What's the ‘magic' number of sessions where you will achieve these positive benefits yet not hinder the results you see as far as your ability to build muscle?

For most people, two to three sessions of cardio a week, performed for twenty to thirty minutes should be plenty enough to allow them to keep their cardiovascular system in shape and increase recovery.

Obviously you should not expect to see huge performance gains with respect to endurance or sprint events while using this type of set-up, but strictly speaking to enhance muscle gain and keep you healthy, this should do the trick.

Remember too that these sessions do not need to be overly intense or painful. A fast paced walk of about four miles an hour, a bike ride that gets your heart rate up, or a swim that has you moving at a decent pace should work well to achieving these objectives.

If you do opt to go with something that is higher intensity in nature, such as sprint or interval training, you will need to make room to accommodate this by performing fewer weight lifting sessions during the week. These types of cardio sessions should be treated as a weight workout themselves, as they will be working the legs in a more similar manner to that of weight lifting.

If you wind up pairing too many intense cardio sessions in with your weight lifting, you're just going to end up overtraining yourself and potentially even suffering from an overuse injury.

So, be sure you keep this in mind when planning your workout program designed to build muscle. Proper organizational structure of any workout is really going to be key to getting those results you're looking for.