Does Cardio Kill Your Gains?

Does cardio kill your gains? Cardio will not kill your gains if you consume enough calories and are doing enough resistance training. Cardio will only kill your gains if you are not eating enough food and you are doing too much cardio. What would be considered too much cardio?

Does cardio kill your gains? iStock-photo credit: yacobchuk

Anything more than 2 hours a day and consuming less than 1200 calories a day would obviously kill any muscle gains you are trying to make. Cardio is important for maintaining a healthy heart. And unfortunately, if you read enough information from muscle heads, they will make you believe it is contradictory to building lean muscle mass which is simply not true.

You must be at an extreme caloric deficit to lose any lean muscle mass gains. If you are doing cardio and you are worried about killing your gains, then it might be advisable to have your cardio be HIIT which is high intensity interval training. And that is training in a high intensity way about 30 minutes or less.

If you keep your cardio at 1 hour maximum or less daily along with weight-training about 3 to 4 days a week. And eating enough calories that will put you in the maintenance phase then you shouldn’t have a problem with losing any muscle mass.

There are studies that have shown natural bodybuilders doing 30-to-40-minute cardio workouts and never lose any significant muscle at all. The magic question is when should I do cardio? Should I do this before or after weight-training?

And the best answer is you should do cardio after weight-training, and the reason is you won’t be as tired strength wise. If you do cardio before weight-training, it will zap your energy and affect your strength levels while lifting.

So, try to do your cardio after your weight-training session from an energy efficiency perspective.

The Bottom Line is doing cardio will not kill your muscle gains whatsoever. But if you aren’t consuming enough calories and you are doing 2 hours or more cardio daily then yes it will make you lose lean muscle mass.

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