Some more questions

[blasin]

I am wondering what the cardio during off days are for?

I thought cardio was for losing fat? Right?

But if you want to gain mass, you shouldn't be able to loss fat?

Because you need take in less cals?

Example:

Gain mass = 2500 cals.

Cutting = 1600 cals.

So... What are the cardio for?

Confused

Thanks...

 

[Lol]

Cardio is for aerobic fitness, inc. heart and lung exercise, circulation efficiency and reducing blood pressure. Cardio is not specifically for losing fat but can obviously be used as part of a plan to lose fat if that was your goal. As long as you account for the extra calories burned and increase cals accordingly, it is perfectly possible to gain mass and do cardio.

Doing a lot of cardio (eg. long-distance, endurance work) will likely make it hard to consume enough cals in order to grow and will also interfere with the way your body tries to adapt to high load exercise (eg. weights). Larger diameter, hypertrophied muscle fibres are not as efficient for this type of exercise as smaller diameter fibres (to do with the distance oxygen has to be transported to mitochondria etc.).

If you look at some of the top CrossFitters, they are able to attain a fairly high level of cardio fitness while still being able to move some heavy iron. The two things are not mutually exclusive so you can train for both but you will get better at whichever one you focus on, to the detriment of the other (SAID principle).