A Necessary Evil

Most bodybuilders hate cardiovascular training.  I am no exception to this generalization.  After 16 years of preparing for competitions, I have tried many different approaches to cardio.  In the early years I did 20 minutes of high intensity stepping on the stairmaster after my resistance training.  I then went through a period where I did the recumbent bike for 45-60 minutes in the mornings.  For several years, I used a treadmill on a four degree incline for 30-45 minutes.  I learned pretty early on that morning cardio on an empty stomach worked best for me, so most of my cardio over the years happened first thing in the morning.  At one point, I bought a cheap treadmill from Sears that I plopped in the living room of my college apartment.  Luckily I lived with other meatheads who did not have a problem with this or with the fact that it made a lot of noise first thing in the morning.  I liked this because I could watch TV while I did cardio (this was back in the day before they mounted HD TV’s on all the cardio equipment in gyms).  I played with cardio 3-4 days per week, cardio 5-6 days per week, and eventually cardio 7 days a week.  In the years when I did more cardio I was always more shredded, but my muscles were stringy and I often lost a lot of strength.  When I did less cardio and tried to retain more muscle, I was never as lean as I felt I should have been.  These days, I do more cardio than ever.  I still hate it, but I have gotten used to it and it is as routine as brushing my teeth.  Before a show I work up to two 30-45 minute sessions per day.  The first session occurs first thing in the morning on an empty stomach and the second session happens after I finish my resistance training in the evenings.  I usually switch from the stepper, to the elliptical, to the recumbent bike.  I switch for two reason: 1. to avoid boredom 2. so that I don’t get blisters or stress certain parts of my body too much from the repeated motions on one particular piece of equipment.  This definitely makes for a long day sometimes over two hours per day in the gym.  Many top pro and national level bodybuilders do even more than this (I’ve read about a couple guys who do 90 minutes twice a day).  For me, this approach seems to work well, but what I do now that is key, that I did not do in my early years of competing, is eat a ton more food.  I keep calories very high when I’m doing all of this cardio (in the 3500-4000 range) and because of all this cardio I’m doing, I am still in a calorie deficit and am burning fat.  This kind of hurts when it comes to buying groceries as I can eat a ton when I do this, but I feel great when my metabolism is moving real fast as a result of this increased energy expenditure.  Granted, I can’t keep this up for long and I don’t do it year round, but if your looking to burn all the fat off of your body, it works.  I also feel like it helps me gain and retain muscle.  This is likely due to the increased calorie intake during the process.  As I am just coming off of this competition a few weeks ago and I have a vacation coming up in less than three weeks, I am continuing to do morning cardio right now for 30 minutes.  I have to say it really doesn’t bother me at this point and I dare say I even look forward to it a little bit:)