Please Scroll Down to See Forums Below
napsgear
genezapharmateuticals
domestic-supply
puritysourcelabs
UGL OZ
UGFREAK
napsgeargenezapharmateuticals domestic-supplypuritysourcelabsUGL OZUGFREAK

Cardio for cutting

letsrun4it

New member
If diet is spot on then you're already in caloric debt. If you do cardio on top of that, dont you need to eat more? Doesn't that cancel out the cardio?

Beyond overall health benefits of doing cardio, what is the main benefit of cardio during cutting if the diet is spot on. I know there must be an answer to this...

ok best way to put it:

What is the difference between being 500 calories in debt per day with cardio and 500 calories in debt per day without cardio?
 
Simple answer- 500 cal. - 500 cal. expended on cardio = 0
More complicated answer- you're also conditioning your body which will have positive carryover to your other training efforts and well as your general health. On the other hand, you 're also introducing added stress to your neuro-muscular system that may not have had adequate recovery time.
So, it's not just simple math. It's also a quality of life issue.
 
Check my avatar....


8% for most of all last summer - ZERO cardio and I was clean.


I tight diet AND intense lifting CAN do it for some.


btw - all things considered...you are better on a lower cal diet than a looser one and doing cardo.

Cals are cals - but excess cardio will strip muscle via increased cortisol production.

Keep a tight diet and focus on NOT losing LBM
 
The Shadow said:
Check my avatar....


8% for most of all last summer - ZERO cardio and I was clean.


I tight diet AND intense lifting CAN do it for some.


btw - all things considered...you are better on a lower cal diet than a looser one and doing cardo.

Cals are cals - but excess cardio will strip muscle via increased cortisol production.

Keep a tight diet and focus on NOT losing LBM

Well that sure as hell will not work for me........ but it deff. looks like it works for Shadow!
 
If you want to look into it further, there was an article on t-nation awhile ago talking about something the douchebag author called J-flux, I believe. There's a guy on BB.com goes by Slippy who is a very very sharp guy and knows a lot about it. Long story short, it was better to turn your body into a furnace, eating a ton, but burning even more to lose weight. Essentially, if you can change your body comp w/ a 5000k diet versus a 2k calorie diet, it's supposedly better.

If I find the links, I'll add 'em.
 
Protobuilder said:
If you want to look into it further, there was an article on t-nation awhile ago talking about something the douchebag author called J-flux, I believe. There's a guy on BB.com goes by Slippy who is a very very sharp guy and knows a lot about it. Long story short, it was better to turn your body into a furnace, eating a ton, but burning even more to lose weight. Essentially, if you can change your body comp w/ a 5000k diet versus a 2k calorie diet, it's supposedly better.

If I find the links, I'll add 'em.

I would love more info on this.
 
It's G-Flux, by the way, not J-flux.

I'll paste some PMs I exchanged w/ Slippy from BB.com. I don't think he'd mind.

Slippy said:
G-Flux works great for general recomp (i.e. losing body fat while gaining muscle.) For bulking, it causes some complications because you have to not only eat more, but you have to orient carbs toward keeping muscle glycogen levels high and avoid overtraining. On the other hand, if you're already a big eater, then bulking this way can produce terrific, largely fat-free gains. And for conditioning purposes, it can work very, very well as long as you monitor performance/overtraining symptoms.

Essentially G-flux -- or the way it's valuable from a bodybuilding standpoint -- are two components.

A) High to very high frequency training.

This is the most important part. Although that article gives examples about super-long workouts, G-Flux is better associated with Waterbury's VHF thinking. So if we're talking about 20 hours of workload, we may be really talking about twelve ~100-minute sessions per week.

In terms of frequency, the highest flux is measured not by the # of sessions per week, but how often the major regions are worked. So, for example, if you did 12x-a-week, but split your workout routine 4 ways, the flux would be lower than if you trained 6x-a-week but legs everyday, be it weightlifting or sprinting. The flux would be higher if you worked legs often than if you worked arms often. The flux is higher if you did 2 sets everyday than if you did 4 sets every other day.

B) Anaerobic elements either oriented toward speed/strength or conditioning

When it comes to anaerobic exercise, there's basically 3 major elements. All exercise tends to touch on all three elements, but of course to different degrees. In terms of flux, these are ordered from least to most.

1) Strength/speed/power work
2) Aerobic capacity or VO2 max
3) Lactate threshhold

G-Flux is partially about burning a lot of calories and eating more calories. But, really, G-Flux is really about nutrient partitioning, food timing and all that. We usually associate partitioning with carb loads and cutting, but here the term is meant for bulking and conditioning purposes as well.

After working out, glycogen and protein turnover rates are spiked for a brief amount of time, which potentially creates a very anabolic, high-energy environment for your muscles. Now, if you increase frequency and flip the switch more often, your body stays in this state for a much longer time. If you use high-burn techniques (lactate threshhold) with periodic heavy training, you can create bigger spikes for glycogen for protein. Combine the two, and you have big time flux.

And, of course, you have higher potential for overtraining. More than that, you may be seriously challenged to eat enough to compensate. If you train in the 9-12x-a-week and are looking to bulk, then you'll want to probably double your caloric intake for the bulk, timing a good chunk of carbs around both workouts.

Finally, you have to include carb refeeds on your rest days, bulking or cutting. Because you go through glycogen at an alarming rate, you need to have glycogen levels at a high (cutting) to very high (bulking) level, which may mean 4-6g of carbs per LBM (lbs) on rest days.

So, in short, to boost flux, you . . .

A) Increase bodypart frequency using anaerobic training.

B) Go by burn, then heart rate, and finally heaviness of weight.

C) Time post-WO carbs and do periodic refeeds.

So, the above are general points on flux. If you're trying to lean out to sub-11% levels without losing mass, this method works great. If you're an endomorph who has problems bulking cleanly, this is an excellent way to go.

Protobuilder said:
So, I'd think of it as more of a "cutting" cycle plan, which means it'd be hard to work into a typical bulk cycle

slippy said:
Absolutely. It makes sense for cutting, because essentially it lets you optimize a Timed Carb Diet scheme everyday. But for bulking, it creates a lot of complications, albeit with a big upside.

If you're already added a burn set after your strength work, and you work bodyparts either in a full body setup or at least twice a week, then the bulking should be fairly clean.

Generally, it makes most sense to do a lactate threshhold scheme as a separate conditioning cycle. Then, you can set up a flux plan with it, say using weight training as lactate training and sprinting/cardio to train VO2 max, exercising often, varying overall intensity against these two factors. This type of scheme is usually associated with body recomposition, but it's also useful for building tendon/ligament strength for the next strength cycle as well as building the conditioning and "metabolic efficiency."

Successful planning for a flux scheme involves dual factor. So, for example, if you wanted to work in conditioning into a 5x5 cycle . . .

1) At the beginning of the 5x5, you would have the strongest lactate training.

2) You taper off the intensity of the lactate training. As you approach the target 5RM, you eventually drop it altogether.

3) You may use a wave pattern to vary the intensity of lactate training as you taper down.

4) The strength of the lactate training isn't just measured by how much volume you're dealing with, but also the specificity of your lactate work. To follow . . .

For example, say you were training for the squat and you noticed your hip flexors were a significant weak link. At the beginning of your 5x5, in addition to generic burn set, you would include an extra set or two, where you would work the hip flexors directly. Largely, you would use a machine and work light-weight, high-rep pulses (very limited partials) where the muscle is mostly worked near its peak contraction and where it creates the most lactic acid. Each set is only about 15-20 sets, but it creates an enormous burn in the area and metabolic adaptation. Then, as you progress through 5x5, you taper down the amount of specific work you do, and then drop it altogether as you approach the target.

Or . . if you find that your overall aerobic conditioning is poor, you may include lengthy amount of cardio or GPP in the beginning of your 5x5 and then taper down as you go.

A Flux schedule, then, would have you assign separate sessions for each factor. Or in a more sophisticated application, overlap along different frequencies with intensity cycling. So, for example, if the strength session and lactate session fell on the same day, the lactate session would be very light. If a lactate session came right after a carb load, then it may be very intense.

Of course, you'll then get to a point where you're basically training like a college athlete.

Do some searching on BB.com for G-flux and you can probably find more info. Also, the T-nation article. "G-flux" is just a name the T-fag author stuck on the idea. It's not a new idea necessarily.
 
I also exchanged pm's with slippy a few months back,gave some good advice in regards to this kind of training.Here are a few pieces he wrote in various pm's


[Slippy]
2)In regards to your reccomendation of HIIT,could a full body GPP such as ''the bear'' be used in its place?

Yeah, that's fine. Both the Bear and Tabatta would work fine. You know you've done "adequately enough" when you feel at least a good burn in the legs. I would add that it's important during the first 2 weeks to guage DOMS and make sure you're not overtraining. Again, it's important to start light, so you can progress in weights every 2 weeks or so.


Quote:
3)Would it help if I added in a few LISS cardio sessions during the week just to help with partitioning/fatloss?


Yes, but it may lead to overtraining. The ideal is to do a high flux routine like Waterbury UHF programs, because most of your muscles will be metabolically active more often. That is to fit as many HIIT or lactate training sessions as possible into a week, be it AM/PM or consecutive day training. However, that's extremely difficult to sustain.

In order to "guarantee" 0.5% BF/week loss from a HIIT or lactate training program, the muscles, particularly the legs and back, need to be hit 3 or 4 times a week, directly or indirectly. Most GBC schemes are roughly 3x-a-week full body sessions. I think the Meltdown training defaults to a 4-way split with 2x-a-week per bodypart.

And, so, what you would do is to decide which program you like, and then schedule extra GPP or generic, full-body HIIT sessions, so that at least leg muscles are getting hit 3 or 4x-a-week. During the first week, you may just stick to the lactate training program, so that you can guage your fitness level as well as deal with the DOMS. During the 2nd week, you start adding GPP sessions.

By week 3-4, you should know how much you can realistically do. Then, you can add LISS sessions to eek out another half pound per week.

I think most trainees would agree that lactate training programs are the most challenging schemes used in bb/weighlifting circles. You want to "ease" into the program for a few weeks before you go full tilt[/Slippy]

[Slippy]Because you workout at home, you also the option of doing a high flux routine, through AM/PM scheduling. This is generally the fastest method for recomposition, because your body is constantly in hightened nutrient partitioning. If you want to do AM/PM, then you would increase your carbs by another 50-100g, keep the workout sessions short and split the total # of carbs between your two workout sessions.

For a GVT scheme, that could be something like incline bench in the morning and deadlifts in the evening, squats in the morning and bent-over rows in the evening, flat benches in the morning, Bear-style training in the evening, etc. Each workout would be about 30 minutes, however your partitioning effect would be more hightened. Mitochondrial profile will significantly improve with a normal GVT schedule over 10 weeks. The trick with recomposition is to work the leg and back regions, directly or indirectly, at least 3-4 sessions per week. In an extreme high flux routine, aggressively using AM/PM, that goes up to 5-10x-a-week.[/Slippy]

[slippy] would recommend scheduling day 4 with deadlifts AM, and then shoulder/arms PM. During deadlifts, you would also concentrate on flexing your transversus abdominus. Doing that with the 10 sets of deadlifts lets you work your abs and core as well, and you'll notice your waistline sinking in significantly after practicing this. If you don't want to do deadlifts, then you can do with the row movements as well as Bear (during the first part of stroke).

Also, you will . . .

1) Get a good GPP workout with 10 sets of deads.

2) Improve the kinetic chain between lower/core/upper body which will improve your overall functional performance

3) Working lower and middle back, which is neglected often with even GPP workouts

4) Improve tendon strength
Here's a high flux style schedule. You may want to eat more to handle workload . . .

Day 1
AM -- chest/back
PM -- Tabata GPP

Day 2
AM -- legs
PM -- Bear GPP. although it seems crazy to do GPP on the same day as legs, your legs will be gone through day 3.

Day 3
Off. Carb load optional.

Day 4
AM -- Regular Deadlifts or Bear GPP
PM -- Shoulder Arms

Day 5
Off.

Frequency: 6 sessions per 5 days
Legs: 5 sessions, 3 days of 5
Back: 5 sessions, 3 days of 5
Upper torso, 4 sessions, 3 days of 5[/slippy]
 
That last sentance-
Of course, then you'll get to the point where you're basically training like a college athlete.

enormously simplifies the task of understanding what to do. As you said, the idea is not new. When I first came across it, like everyone else I was inrigued by the idea. Realistically, though, I not one to carefully measure the values of what I eat on a daily basis. I understood the basics of eating right, though, and how to apply this in a useful way to training theory. So through the natural progression of training better and eating better you can easily fall into this. I knew I wanted to increase the level of my training beyond the norm, but if I sat down with a spreadsheet and tried to plug in all the values I wouldn't have done it. It was best for me to understand the general principal I was working towards and making gradual increments as my experience and mental state warrented. I'm still don't train for events, but nowadays it wouldn't be such a big leap to acheive that degree of refinement.
 
carlsuen said:
man.. all these are just so hard to understand.. guess i'll never be lean/ripped.. sob..

LoL There are definitely easier ways to get lean and ripped. This is just kind of an interesting idea and directly tied to OP's concerns re: cardio or caloric deficit to cut.
 
al420 said:
Well that sure as hell will not work for me........ but it deff. looks like it works for Shadow!


I personally havent trained any male that didnt get to 10% with a strict diet and training only.
 
btw - I do see both sides of the topic, however, the basic laws of thermodynamics still apply, even to bbers and plers.

Cals taken in < cals burned.

^^Outside of any drugs, etc that basic law is true, ie - total cals ingested, must be lower than your metabolic rate(including all cals burned as a result of activity and the thermic effect of food) to lose weight.

Too much cardio will drastically ramp cortisol levels, the most catabolic hormone in the body, and will literally EAT lbm.


I challenge anyone who is currently cutting to REALLY fine tune the diet, and drop cardio and blog results for a month.
 
Top Bottom