Ben Karschnick
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- Jun 17, 2013
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Based on my experience, and what I have learned from others, cardio will only help never harm weightlifting. While a lot of running may lessen your SIZE gains, it will not necessarily lessen your STRENGTH gains. Also, there is NOTHING more important for overall body strength than lower body lifting, aka DEADS AND SQUATS!!!!!!! You should be doing an equal amount of deads and squats(and accompanying lifts) as bench press( and accompanying lifts). Gaining or losing fat depends almost 100% on your diet, you can eat a crap load of food to keep your body fueled without gaining fat if you eat the right foods.
the reason bodybuilders dont run isnt because theyre too big so they cant, its because they WANT to be too big so they DONT. I am not coming up with this on my own, I will quote a professional bodybuilder: "I find that if I do lots of running my legs actually get smaller." Notice he didnt say WEAKER, simply SMALLER. everyone needs to understand the difference between BODYBUILDING and STRENGTH TRAINING, because the two are COMPLETELY different. Although gaining size generally means gaining strength, and gaining strength generally means gaining size, a person that only cares about gaining SIZE will workout completely different than a person who only cares about STRENGTH. This may not be common knowledge but once you understand this is makes perfect sense, compare bodybuilders to power lifters: they way they look and they way they workout is totally different.
Heres a basic example of the two basic different types of workouts, given to me by a professional bodybuilder who trained himself and also trained professional powerlifters. To gain SIZE, the only thing that matters is time under tension, what this means if you dont already know is how long you are placing stress on your muscle, aka how long each set lasts for. The goal is to perform sets lasting 30-45 seconds and to achieve total failure at the end. The rep range should be around 8, so for a 40 second set, each rep should last about 5 seconds. You should PUSH as fast as you possibly can, and then bring the weight back down VERY slowly. To put this in perspective, most workout programs that tell you to do "slow" sets, will prescribe a cadence of one second up, two seconds down. even at 15 reps, this would only put you at the BOTTOM of the spectrum for what is necessary to gain size.
On the contrary, a powerlifter is going to blast through each rep as fast as possible, and most powerlifters on most of their workouts will probably stay around 5 reps or under, and stop just before achieving absolute failure.
Also, for either type of workout, unless youre on steriods or tons of supplements(which most pros are which is why many of them only workout each muscle group once a week), the more often you workout each muscle the more it can grow. The key is not to push your muscles too hard on each workout. You want to BARELY break down your muscles each time, then let them heal and break them down again as soon as possible. Its by doing theses babysteps you experience large gains over a period of time. For example, if you want to do ten sets a week, you could do ten sets once a week, but it would be better to do 5 sets twice a week, and even better to do 3 sets three times per week.
the reason bodybuilders dont run isnt because theyre too big so they cant, its because they WANT to be too big so they DONT. I am not coming up with this on my own, I will quote a professional bodybuilder: "I find that if I do lots of running my legs actually get smaller." Notice he didnt say WEAKER, simply SMALLER. everyone needs to understand the difference between BODYBUILDING and STRENGTH TRAINING, because the two are COMPLETELY different. Although gaining size generally means gaining strength, and gaining strength generally means gaining size, a person that only cares about gaining SIZE will workout completely different than a person who only cares about STRENGTH. This may not be common knowledge but once you understand this is makes perfect sense, compare bodybuilders to power lifters: they way they look and they way they workout is totally different.
Heres a basic example of the two basic different types of workouts, given to me by a professional bodybuilder who trained himself and also trained professional powerlifters. To gain SIZE, the only thing that matters is time under tension, what this means if you dont already know is how long you are placing stress on your muscle, aka how long each set lasts for. The goal is to perform sets lasting 30-45 seconds and to achieve total failure at the end. The rep range should be around 8, so for a 40 second set, each rep should last about 5 seconds. You should PUSH as fast as you possibly can, and then bring the weight back down VERY slowly. To put this in perspective, most workout programs that tell you to do "slow" sets, will prescribe a cadence of one second up, two seconds down. even at 15 reps, this would only put you at the BOTTOM of the spectrum for what is necessary to gain size.
On the contrary, a powerlifter is going to blast through each rep as fast as possible, and most powerlifters on most of their workouts will probably stay around 5 reps or under, and stop just before achieving absolute failure.
Also, for either type of workout, unless youre on steriods or tons of supplements(which most pros are which is why many of them only workout each muscle group once a week), the more often you workout each muscle the more it can grow. The key is not to push your muscles too hard on each workout. You want to BARELY break down your muscles each time, then let them heal and break them down again as soon as possible. Its by doing theses babysteps you experience large gains over a period of time. For example, if you want to do ten sets a week, you could do ten sets once a week, but it would be better to do 5 sets twice a week, and even better to do 3 sets three times per week.
