Muscle tissue quality

[Arhat of Fury]

If you are training above THR during cardio, would your muscle tissue quality be worse than training in THR.

This is paired with a bodybuilding routine.

Whaddya all think

[Ford Prefect]

I think THR is basically a bunch of crap unless you are talking about a guideline for maximal HR before your heart explodes. ;) For bodybuilding, you really only need to walk. The cardio will effect the muscle's ability to hypertrophy.

[Arhat of Fury]

will walking burn fat calories at an acceptable rate.

[Ford Prefect]

Diet is essentially what winnows away the fat for a bodybuilder. Cardio helps a little as well, but in order to retain as much muscle mass as possible, especially while restrictive dieting, cardio needs to be done sparingly. Most bodybuilders will brisky walk on a incline treadmill for their "cardio". This will burn nearly as much calories as a jog on flat ground without taxing the system.

This is speaking stricly about bodybuilding.

[Arhat of Fury]

when you say taxing the system, what are you referring to ??? high impact???

[Ford Prefect]

Nope. Even low intensity, long duration jogging conflicts with muscle hypertrophy.

[Viper555]

^What about high intensity interval training for about 14 minutes?

[Toby]

What sort of HIIT? I'm hardly an expert, but I would think HIIT would be the best type of endurance workout you could do while retaining muscle mass. E.g. (you all know) I do Taku's intervals. This is probably relatively similar to a sprinter's track workout. Sprinters are amongst the "biggest" of the track and field athletes. OK, I realise there are other factors that come into it. But I run (roughly) 8 or 10x100m each time = 4 or 5 min workout time not including warmup/cooldown. I recall reading once that some female sprinters average heavy track work day consisted of less than 400m total. Mostly explosive starts and acceleration.

[Ford Prefect]

Sprints are a less invasive to hypertrophy goals because of the nature of exertion (energy systems/muscle fibers) involved. However they will still interfere with hypertrophy. If you are in your cutting phase, then they are preferable to LDE because they will allow you to retain more muscle mass. You will still lose some though.

[rubthebuddha]

Ford (aka cap'n consultant) -- are the losses in mass due to cardio reflected elsewhere, like losses in raw strength?

[Ford Prefect]

They're due to many factors. Basically you're giving your body conflicting information in what it should adapt to. All training and de-training are from us being an adaptive organism that will adapt to whatever stimuli is it presented with; both "positive" and "negative". When you do cardio, you increase stress hormones which hamper mass gain, your body will often turn catabolic and atrophy slightly, and some branches of human phsyiology have data showing the fast twitch fibers are burned to provide energy to slow-twitch fibers in some cases. There are really a myriad of things that could potentially interfere, halt, or even reverse mass gain.

This is why bodybuilders are always looking for ways to retain the most lean mass possible when they are cutting. Even for those guys who are genetic freaks and on insane amounts of roids, they lose muscle mass when they turn up the diet and the cardio. If they lose lean mass, the average guy obviously stands little chance. While it is not wholey impossible to gain weight while still doing cardio, it sure is immeasurable easier to just cut it out. For the guys looking to gain weight, who are usually ectomorphs, it is nearly impossible to do. I tried for years myself, and it's not until I completely cut out all cardio, that I started making steady progress.

Losses in raw strength will play a partial role too, btw, depending on the diet and the cardio frequency & intensity.

[rubthebuddha]

gotcha. i be not an ectomorph, so cutting weight is actually what i'm going for. i'm pretty strong, but i'm hoping to lean out. if i lose a little mass, that's ok -- i'll try to gain it back later. as long as i don't suffer much strength loss, i won't mind mass loss.