Hello and welcome to another episode of the ESG Fitness Podcast.

This week I have some bloody awesome questions.

So I'm just going to get straight to it.

And the first one is from Ban and it is.

Why is it that people say that cardio will ruin your gains or that it will reduce the effects of strength training?

This is a very interesting question and one that I really enjoy geeking out on. So I'm going to geek out on it now.

So essentially the question is,

will doing too much cardio ruin or hamper your strength gains?

And the answer is no, but also yes.

And here's why.

If we look at exercise on a spectrum,

so one end you have resistance training training and on the other end you have

traditional cardio and high intensity interval training probably lies somewhere in the middle. Well,

doesn't probably lie somewhere in the middle. It does lie somewhere in the middle. So the reason

that these two forms of training, i.e. resistance training and cardio, can influence each

other is that they have very different physiological adaptations. So when you're training for

endurance or you're doing cardio, most of the adaptations are around oxygen transport, capillary

density, mitochondrial biogenesis. So the mitochondria is, if you

remember from high school biology, the powerhouse of the cell. So the more of them that you have,

the better your insurance capacity. These are the sum of the primary adaptations to endurance type training to improve your aerobic capacity. These are the sum of the primary adaptations to endurance type training to improve your

aerobic metabolism. And when you resistance train, the adaptations are more based around

increased muscle fibre size and increased muscle fibre recruitment and potentially some adaptations towards anaerobic as opposed to aerobic

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