How to Do Your Cardio Routine Well Without Ruining Your Muscle Hypertrophy?

A person who wants to gain muscle mass and who wants to gain strength is usually an enemy of this cardio since they think that it will ruin all the muscle hypertrophy work they are doing.

This should not be the case since cardiovascular exercise and strength exercise are not enemies, on the contrary. Yes, it is true that it has certain interferences but there are ways to work on cardio without it significantly interfering with your muscle mass gain.

How to Do Your Cardio Routine Well Without Ruining Your Muscle Hypertrophy?

Cardio improves respiratory capacity.

Cardiovascular exercise helps you learn to breathe in a more controlled way and optimize oxygen utilization when you exercise.

If you use this in strength training, the fatigue is less, since you synchronize your breathing with the strength exercise you are doing. Additionally, by performing cardiovascular exercise and improving your lung capacity , you will feel less tired when you do your strength exercises.

Cardiovascular exercise is linked to mitochondrial density.

Mitochondria are the energy source of the cell, especially when performing aerobic exercise, helping to generate an increase in physical performance and delaying the onset of muscle fatigue .

A study conducted by Hoopeler in 1985 showed that aerobic cardiovascular training helps increase the mitochondrial content of skeletal muscle, thus helping you have more muscle mass when you do your strength exercises.

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Improves the ability to transport and capture oxygen.

Our ability to capture, transport and use oxygen is even inversely linked to mortality. In fact, doing physical exercise helps delay the aging of cells .

It is true that it cannot eliminate aging, but regular physical exercise can help slow down the effects of aging on a physical and mental level, as different studies such as the one from Stanford Medicine have shown.⁽¹⁾

Better cardiorespiratory fitness improves recovery and allows you to work harder and better

Without a doubt, it will undoubtedly improve the speed of recovery between sessions, and this allows you to work for more days and more effectively. A person who has better physical condition and capacity at an aerobic level and overall performance allows him or her to work with a high work capacity, especially with high weights and with high intensity. It allows you to do more repetitions and with more weights, since you are better able to maintain the physical demand at a cardiorespiratory level.

Keep this in mind before you stop doing cardio.

Yes, it is true that if you want to work on hypertrophy you have to work on muscular hypertrophy, in the same way that if you want to work on strength, you have to do exercises to improve it. But have you considered that having good physical condition in general will benefit you from having more hypertrophy?

Well, of course yes, but it does not mean that you do 1 hour of running, but it does mean that incorporating certain minutes of cardiovascular work into the day and anything that makes you move will benefit you.

Now, we have to keep in mind that if we focus too much on improving our physical resistance it can generate a certain interference phenomenon, which means that if you focus too much on your level of resistance your strength levels will be compromised. You have to find a balance that is adapted to your body composition.