Your opinon on Low Intensity Cardio

[BruteForce]

These guys said in different way's what I was tryin to say, Coach. I'm in the same boat with them. Decent heart rate for a few minutes keeps good blood flow through the muscles allowing for improved nutrient delivery and oxygenation. I noticed a substantial recovery improvement as well as not being as out of breath during my weight training. I don't have a peer reviewed journal I can post or any articles but, like PMDL, I can say from experience that it seems to help a lot.

[matclone]

I can say from experience that any long, slow distance running is counterproductive to strength gains. If strength is not your goal, or you have other goals like the endomorfinis experience of running, then maybe it doesn't matter. As for recovery, I'm not sure how long distance running is going to help recover from weight training since it serves as an additional stressor on the body, no matter how easy you take it. Rest and good food (as has been said).

[cjangelo]

Rip,

Let's summarize things: for people that intend to gain like Zach Evetts/Cliff Swanson, cardio temporarily serves no benefit, with calories and sleep being the important recovery modalities.

For people that are already 230lbs (such as myself), spending 20-30 minutes elevating our heart rates to 120-130BPM along with stretching and foam rolling on the day after our barbell training constitutes a useful recovery modality. In addition, of course, to plenty of food and sleep.

Can we agree on this?

[Mark Rippetoe]

Seems like a reasonable place to agree.

[Chewie_jrc]

BruteForce, sir, you're leaving out some key info though. In our last "discourse" in the recovery forum, it didn't come out for several pages that you purposely capped your workout to 1-hour in the gym (something about needing your "PWO shake"). That's fine if you want or need to hurry in and get out of the gym, but let's talk about optimal results for strength training, especially the crowd that Rip's program caters to (the underfed, underweight, and understrong) and how cardio will probably not help your recovery (probably negatively impact it).

Assuming your diet (most people it's probably not enough) and sleep (again, probably too little for most) are in order, the single best thing you can do is increase rest between work sets. Maybe you can start off with just 2-3 minutes in between, but as it gets heavier and heavier i've had to increase it to 6+ min between sets. This seems to be the norm. If you must rush through your workouts (or in your case, voluntarily limit your time), you have changed the way you need to do business. Maybe you can use some conditioning work to help you make it through your workout. I dunno, just speculating...I just upped the rest time.

I didn't want to get into your thread but it's just lame when this shit has been discussed to death and there is plenty of clinical experience (from Rip's trainees and the guys that frequent on the forum here). It just adds to the signal noise when people throw crap out there on the interwebz about how they need to do cardio to optimize strength gains.

In summary,

• Do cardio for cardio's sake if that's what you want (CV health, fun, whatever). I mentioned in your last thread that I surf twice a week. It hasn't affected my workouts though so it's not a prob.
• Do cardio/conditioning if that's what your goals or needs are. Example, getting ready for a fitness assessment (mil/leo/etc), you're an intermediate and it fits your sport, etc.
• Cardio/conditioning/metKon will NEGATIVELY affect your linear progression. It will not kill you to sacrifice your conditioning while developing your strength. Your heart will not explode if you don't go jogging. Your heart will more than likely adapt to pure strength training as does the rest of your system. You will optimize your strength gains, will reach the end of the novice phase quicker, and be better prepared for your specific goals if you take the time and do it correctly. This is too easy and has been laid out for us to the T.

Sorry for the long winded post. I've been working remotely lately and don't have my boss micromanaging with stupid shit. I now have too much time for stuff like this during the early afternoon. My apologies.

Respectfully Yours,
Justin