Cardio Not Needed To Cut Up?

[costasoldatos]

Let's compare doing cardio to elevating heartrate while working out. I believe just like Mike Mentzer had stated in his teaching's that cardio is not needed. Cardio only elevate's the heartrate, thus allowing you to burn more calories while you are not working out(resting).

I believe just like Mentzer state's that by Supersetting your workout's to keep your heartrate elevated that you can achieve the same effects as cardio if not greater. Let's think about it for a moment, Supersetting (performing consecutive exercise's without resting) your workout elevate's your heartrate while you are stressing the body with weight's both at the same time, which would allow you to burn even greater calorie's while resting than with cardio, where with cardio you are only elevating your heartrate, and not performing any weight training what so ever. Also to back up this theory, which is the same theory that Mike Mentzer believe's is that when you weight train your body must recover fully in order to achieve maximum muscle building results, well when you perform cardio you are stressing the same system that you are trying to allow to recover from the weight training, thus delaying your recovery and not achieveing the most from your weight training.

Now with Brief and Infrequent Training and supersetting at the same time to elevate the heartrate(which achieve's the same result's as cardio even better). You are allowing your body to fully recover and are getting the results of cardio.


Now once you believe this article to be true, that cardio done while weight training is the way to go then you just adjust your calorie's 500 below maintenance level, once your progress taper's off then proceed with subtracting another 500 calorie's from the previous number.


In conclusion, I only wrote this article to open people's mind's, those who have an open mind in the first place. I have been weight training for 5 year's. And when I first came in to contact with the writing's of Mike Mentzer I was confused. I believed in his writing's but I just wasn't ready to fully believe and follow the writing's. But the past two year's have shown me that his writing's are true, but with any approach to weight training, you will always make little adjustment's here and there, little tweak's so to speak.

ONCE YOU HAVE A BELIEVE YOU STOP LEARNING, BECAUSE YOU REFUSE TO HEAR ANY MORE ON THE MATTER. KEEP AN OPEN MIND

[psikooz]

Your article makes perfect sense.

But cardio isnt just for cutting up, it trains the heart, and unfortunatly "suppersetting" isnt the best way to do that. Most of us superset regardless of if we are doing it for cutting.

Cardio is the best way to burn fat, now i believe combining a three day a week cardio routine with suppersetting would be good. But you cant neglect doing cardio, you have to train your heart so it adapts to the muscle you have.

just my 2 c

[Scar]

To be honest......I treat Mentzer like I would a rabid dog..with extreme caution...

Both he and his brother did it his way and ended up dead in their early 50's. His advice on cardio.....be it heart health or fatloss is something I wouldn't bother my backside with

[str8flexed]

to get enough cardio from lifting (for most of us anyway) to get in ripped condition would cause gross overtraining...

hmm I'll take this set to failure followed by this drop set, super setted with this and tri-setted with this...

and I'll also need 3g of test per week in order to recover from this workout.

No thanks, I'll do HIIT cardio and retain muscle just fine, and improve my cardiovascular health. Mentzer is the epitome if the gym PhD.. he could convince anyone of anything b/c he was big.

[newlifter87]

Originally posted by str8flexed
to get enough cardio from lifting (for most of us anyway) to get in ripped condition would cause gross overtraining...

hmm I'll take this set to failure followed by this drop set, super setted with this and tri-setted with this...

and I'll also need 3g of test per week in order to recover from this workout.

No thanks, I'll do HIIT cardio and retain muscle just fine, and improve my cardiovascular health. Mentzer is the epitome if the gym PhD.. he could convince anyone of anything b/c he was big.

haha BUMP, how true is that.

[Abacaz]

Correct me if I'm wrong (I'm serious...please do), but aside from getting a healthier heart from cardio, won't sticking to a very clean diet (high protein, low simple carbs) have just as good of an effect on your body fat as cardio would....I mean, if you're eating less cals than you are burning in the day, aren't you gonna lose weight regardless? Again, I realize the importance of cardio on your heart, but I've read a lot of articles, and have learned from personal experience that you can keep your body fat pretty low by simply eating healthy (which I'm sure anyone who is reading this probably already does). Peace fellas


Rob

[str8flexed]

cardio has positive effects on nutrient partitioning, anabolic hormones, VO2 max, oxygen utilization, and cardio vascular health that diet cannot provide... to list a few.

[costasoldatos]

If my workout is 45 minutes long, and I superset it, I get all the benefits of cardio while lifting weights at the same time. Then just adjust your calories to 300-500 below maintenance level and that is all that is needed to achieve a ripped midsection.

[str8flexed]

Originally posted by costasoldatos
If my workout is 45 minutes long, and I superset it, I get all the benefits of cardio while lifting weights at the same time. Then just adjust your calories to 300-500 below maintenance level and that is all that is needed to achieve a ripped midsection.

that would be great... if you weren't overtraining the **** out of your nervous system in the process.

[Builderofmuscle]

i'm reading the discussion, and I'm thinking. Do people say that you don't need cardio, because maybe they don't like doing cardio? I agree, doing cardio is boring, but as a Martial Artist, Cardio is my life! Read my article STRENGTH ENDURANCE REVISED, to see what I mean. And why the **** didn't anyone respond to that article, or any of my posts for that matter. This is the reason why I don't hang around this forum as often as I should, no one seems to ****ing care about what I have to say.

Anyways, in the article I talk about running or doing cardio with hand weights. Well, this can also be extremely boring. What I like to do, is run sprints. This helps me get an extremely effective cardio workout in a short period of time. I guess it's like HIT cardio, or MAX OT, or whatever **** you want to call it. But all you basically do , is start off with a jog, and then run two or three sprint intervals in between jogging. You're workouts can last 15 minutes, and you'll still be sweating like a goddamned pig.

Another cardio I like to do, is hit the heavy bag. Again 15 to 20 minutes is all it takes. hIT THE bag WITHOUT gloves, and imagine you're kicking some guy's ass. This is also a great way to releive some stress.

[BeowulfKTF]

Originally posted by str8flexed
cardio has positive effects on nutrient partitioning, anabolic hormones, VO2 max, oxygen utilization, and cardio vascular health that diet cannot provide... to list a few.

Dah? I'm gonna have to trust you on that one:)

[Psycorower]

Originally posted by costasoldatos
If my workout is 45 minutes long, and I superset it, I get all the benefits of cardio while lifting weights at the same time. Then just adjust your calories to 300-500 below maintenance level and that is all that is needed to achieve a ripped midsection.

That works fine if you are not using heavy weights but i'm guessing you are using fairly heavy weights and your routine is still closer to a bodybuilding routine than circuit training.

Lifting heavy weights dramatically increases intramuscular pressure meaning the heart is already heavily stressed when lifting heavy weights to try maintain blood flow. Couple this with increased cardiovascular demand and your blood pressure will be dangerously high. Heavy weight lifting alone can increase your BP to rise to 400/300, whereas rhythmic exercise such as running is usually of the order of 200/70. I'm not sure if it's the wisest idea as you will essentially not give your heart any let up whatsoever. Your training quality is probably reduced also. And as str8flexed said, overtraining may be an issue.

This may work for you but i'm not sure if it is the best (or safest) way of doing it. Also don't think just because your heart is pumping hard that the effects will be identical to rhythmic exercise. The dependace of this type of exercise will be predominantly PCr and glycogen with very little contribution from FFA's at all. This will more likely just result in intramuscular glycogen depletion which will prevent optimal recovery and also as the utilisation of fat is so low using this method it is quite possible that a large portion of the weight you lose will be either water weight as a result of decreased glycogen or will be muscle mass. Just my thoughts.

[AussieTank]

super sets can be very catabolic when cutting!

[Vel]

Originally posted by costasoldatos
If my workout is 45 minutes long, and I superset it, I get all the benefits of cardio while lifting weights at the same time. Then just adjust your calories to 300-500 below maintenance level and that is all that is needed to achieve a ripped midsection.

I'm wondering why you say take off 500 calories from maintenance. You only want to go 500 calories below maintenace daily as it is..You'll lose a Lb. of fat per week. Usually, if you dip your cals further south than that, you're looking to knock yourself into starvation mode, and you will horde fat and not lose it. This just happened to me. Fat loss stalled for a few weeks. What you should be doing is just eating at maintenance levels, and letting the exercise take off that 500 or so calories.

Plus don't forget the calories needed just to live..and walk around...Most people's maintenance levels really isn't "bodyweight x12"..Unless they are a slug sitting in bed all day.

[Watchtower]

Originally posted by costasoldatos
If my workout is 45 minutes long, and I superset it, I get all the benefits of cardio while lifting weights at the same time. Then just adjust your calories to 300-500 below maintenance level and that is all that is needed to achieve a ripped midsection.

that's fine and dandy if all you want is a "ripped midsection"

[JohnnyDigital]

Originally posted by Scar
To be honest......I treat Mentzer like I would a rabid dog..with extreme caution...

Both he and his brother did it his way and ended up dead in their early 50's. His advice on cardio.....be it heart health or fatloss is something I wouldn't bother my backside with

it makes for mentzer to state this but he also followed and based this beleif on bruce lee. he was a skinny shredded sucker. bruce always supersetted, but he also did cardio but not has much. well actually i'm not for sure now that i think about it he might have done a lot of cardio cause you have to have lots of stamina for a fight.

[Maxima]

I couldn't agree more that cardiovascular exercise is far inferior to weight training for a couple of reasons that I will get into later, first let me respond to some of the posts here.

Hormones - cardiovascular has a negative effect on anabolic hormones. The hormone associated with cardiovascular exercise is cortisol which promotes conservation of glucose and encourages the use of fat. However this is a double edged sword and as many of you know to grow muscle you do not want to be in a catabolic state, and the amount of fat that you use is very minimal.

Getting lean - muscle burns calories 24 hours a day, it is living active tissue, the more of it you have the more calories you'll burn. In fact after 6 months on a regular exercise program experts at Harvard University found that you will burn on average 30% more calories while just sitting and watching TV. So you want to keep and build as much muscle as you can, cardiovascular goes against this idea because of the catabolic effect. Also, check out how many calories you burn while doing cardio, if you do 45 hard minutes you will be good to burn off a can of Coke. Why do you think those aerobic instructors or the people always on the treadmill never get anywhere?

Heart Health - Last year I disproved a text that said that endurance athletes have healthier hearts than bodybuilders. The book compared VO2max, and the size of the heart of bodybuilders and long distance runners. While the bodybuilders had bigger hearts (more stroke volume (the heart can pump more blood with each beat)) they had lower VO2max. The auther carelessly used VO2max as the tell all in heart health and came to the conclusion that endurance athletes had healthier hearts. However the VO2max tests were performed on a treadmill which mean that the obviously heavier bodybuilder would be at a disadvantage since he was carrying much more weight, as compared to the feather weight endurance athlete (see catabolic, no muscle)
Stanford University has confirmed that studies show that heart health has more to do with how hard you can go, vs how long you can go. This has sparked a trend of interval training, where the participant goes as long as they can as hard as they can, then goes to a lighter pace before going hard again. Now think about a good set of heavy squats, your heart is pumping out of your chest, you rest a little while and do another set.

The only difference between cardiovascular exercise and weight training is the metabolism that you use. You are still taxing your heart and lungs very much with weight training and research is now confirming that you should do work on short bouts to improve heart health.

Peak exercise capacity is what you need for a healthy heart, and you get a side benefit by having extra muscle that burns calories 24 hours a day.

Weight training also increase the degree to which you can activate multiple muscle fibers, increases bone density, increases strength, these are all things that you lose as you get older which cardiovascular does not help.

[fupafighter2]

agreed....the only time id waste time with excessive cardio again is contest prep