Why & How Lifters Should Do Cardio - Beast Over Burden - #549
Barbell Logic
Barbell Logic
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🗓️ 7 May 2024
⏱️ 52 minutes
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Summary
Why and How Lifters Should Do Cardio: What is Cardio?
Cardio is the term for those activities that raise your heart rate and stress your cardiovascular system. Another term - the term we prefer - is conditioning.
Conditioning tends to come more with the idea of a purpose, like training versus exercise. Cardio is more something you should do to get out of breath and sweaty.
There are three general reasons people do cardio.
- Weight loss: Cardio is not a great way to lose weight or get leaner. Rather, focus on nutrition, lift to create a signal for muscle growth, and generally be active.
- Performance: Conditioning helps you perform your sport or activity. For most clients, this means not feeling so out of breath when they play with their kids, go for a hike, or perform other physical activities then enjoy.
- Health: You may perform cardio to be generally more healthy, especially your cardiovascular system.
Why and How Lifters Should Do Cardio: Energy Systems
Cardio encompasses three energy systems.
- Aerobic: This is low-intensity, long duration. You are almost certainly primarily using your aerobic energy system now. This encompasses normal life along with low-intensity exercise, such as walking or an easy jog. You oxidize fat and carbohydrates.
- Glycolytic: Medium-intensity, medium duration (~10s - 2 minutes). You use this for things such as running intervals. You break down carbohydrates.
- Phosphagen: High-intensity, short duration (~10s or less time). You use this for short bursts, such as a 50m sprint, a jump, or a 1RM effort. This uses ATP readily available in your muscles.
Conditioning for lifters will typically stress the aerobic and glycolytic energy systems, as lifting stresses the phosphagen system (and the glycolytic as well).
Why and How Lifters Should Do Cardio: Conditioning for Strength Athletes
Most lifters will want to incorporate some easy aerobic activity and then high-intensity interval training (HIIT).
For the aerobic activity, things that simply get you active suffice. This can mean walks. If you enjoy other activities, such as swimming, running, or biking, by all means do those in Zone 2.
To include intervals, you should perform low-impact, low-skill activities for relatively short durations repeatedly a few times a week.
This can look like accessory circuits at the end of your workouts, hill sprints, prowler pushes, or some type of machine intervals (bike, rower, elliptical, etc.).
Why and how lifters should do cardio depends, but there are some general principles and best practices that make sense for your performance and health.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to Barbell Logic. |
| 0:04.0 | The podcast where we talk about what it means to experience strength. |
| 0:08.0 | And how you can use simple, hard and effective strategies in training and nutrition to improve your life. |
| 0:14.8 | It starts with meeting you where you are right now and finding lasting solutions. |
| 0:19.8 | Welcome to the show. Welcome to the Barbelogne podcast. I'm Matt Reynolds. I'm here with Nicky Sims. I'm standing up today. I feel like standing. Yeah. Serious. Yeah. |
| 0:40.0 | Yeah. Well, I just sit too much. I got a standing desk for a reason. Might as well raise it. |
| 0:45.6 | Yeah. We want to talk today a little bit about man coming to terms with cardio. Cardio is kind of a weird word or we're going to go into it, probably not the best word for how we use it, but I know you and I come from completely different backgrounds and so I think that's going to be really good for the show because I came from the background of I was really interested young like in high school |
| 1:06.7 | with weightlifting with bodybuilders with Arnold Schwarzenegger with you know Arnold Schwarzenegger's |
| 1:11.3 | modern encyclopedia of bodybuilding and then got into powerlifting and was always attracted to the lifting game |
| 1:17.9 | Which means that I was never attracted to the cardio game |
| 1:21.7 | Now there was a time in my life when I competed |
| 1:24.8 | actually probably the time I would look back and say I was in the best shape of my life |
| 1:28.2 | and kind of overall strong and healthy when I was a competitive strong man where you really combined the best of both worlds. |
| 1:35.0 | I mean, sort of like on another level, powerlifting and crossfit way up here, right? |
| 1:39.0 | And so I want to talk a little bit today about both if you come from a background like mine where you have gotten |
| 1:44.3 | to this from like lifting, from this sort of process that I just want to get started on getting |
| 1:49.6 | strong. When should I do cardio? Should I bring it in? |
| 1:52.8 | Like is that you're not really, that's not really your background. |
| 1:55.2 | Your background is completely different. |
| 1:56.6 | How did you get started and what are you seeing out of our primary female audience? |
| 2:01.3 | Yeah, I was definitely a gym rat in the sense of going to the gym and doing all |
| 2:06.7 | the classes, all their cardio classes. Like this all started when I was in high school. |
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