Right manner of doing Cardio and how it helps in muscle gain!

When done properly, cardio can be an excellent way to improve your health, speed up fat loss, and can even help you build muscle and recover faster, but on the contrary, when done improperly, it does the opposite and negatively interferes with the gains you make in the gym. In fact, a 2012 meta-analysis illustrates this point exactly, and found that improperly combining cardio and lifting on average impairs muscle growth by roughly 31% and strength gains by 18%, which is obviously detrimental to your quest for gains. So the big question now is, how exactly can you reap the various benefits of cardio without impairing your gains in the process? I'll cover by going through 4 of the biggest gain killing mistakes that people make with their cardio routines.

One of the most common mistakes is doing cardio at the wrong time. For most people, the most convenient time for them to do cardio is when they're already in the gym for a weights workout. However, when doing so, it's best that you perform your cardio workout after your weights workout rather than before.

This is because when doing cardio before your weights, you'll be more fatigued during your lifting exercises and your strength will likely suffer as a result. In fact, a 2016 paper found that subjects that did a 20-minute cardio session prior to their weights workout performed significantly less reps on their lifting exercises as a result, which is in agreement with multiple other papers on the topic. Therefore, prioritizing your weights workout by moving your cardio to after your workout would be ideal for both strength and muscle gains.

An even better option though, particularly if the cardio session you'll be doing is of moderate to high intensity and or longer than 30 minutes or so, is to perform your cardio and workout sessions completely separately. Supporting this idea is a 2017 paper from the Journal of Sports Science Medicine, which found that in untrained lifters, performing a 30-minute moderate intensity cycling session 24 hours after a biceps workout as opposed to immediately after the workout led to almost a two-fold increase in biceps growth, which is theorized to be due to systemic factors actually interfering with muscle hypertrophy when cardio is performed after a muscle-damaging workout. Now although this study does have its limitations and likely would not apply for shorter and or less intense forms of steady-state cardio, other research is in agreement that when possible, you should separate your lifting and cardio sessions by at least 6 hours apart in order to minimize any possible interference effects and build muscle faster.

When most people think of cardio, they usually think of running, but this may in fact be the worst option if your main goal is to build muscle and strength. This is because running and other high-impact modalities like jump rope, jumping jacks, and high-intensity interval training sprints all have a significant eccentric component to them and as a result, causes a lot of lower body muscle damage that you'll then need to recover from, which can negatively affect your performance during your weights workouts, especially your leg workouts for example. Whereas lower-impact types of cardio don't require nearly as much recovery and therefore don't cause this issue.

In fact, the meta-analysis I mentioned earlier found that performance cycling concurrently with weights led to significantly less of a decrease in lower body growth when compared to running. Therefore, to minimize cardio's interference with your gains, you'll ideally want the majority of your cardio to be done with lower-impact modalities that have a minimal eccentric component to them, such as cycling, the elliptical, and incline walking for example. And when you do choose to include more intense or high-impact forms of cardio, then just be wary of the recovery that they'll require.

You wouldn't want to do a sporadic 30-minute intense battle rope session the day before a shoulder workout for example, as that would likely negatively affect your strength within that shoulder's workout. The last mistake people often make is just doing too much cardio in general. This is detrimental mainly due to the principle of specificity, meaning that if your goal is to maximize muscle growth and strength, then your focus and your priority needs to be on your weights workouts rather than cardio.

In fact, we can see from a concurrent training meta-analysis of 21 studies that the more days per week you incorporate cardio, and the longer the duration of your cardio sessions, the more it interferes with your ability to build muscle and strength. The researchers found that once your cardio sessions exceed 3 or more times per week, and 20-30 minutes in duration, is when they really start to slow down your gains. Although I would not suggest necessarily using that as the upper limit of cardio you should be doing, it does nonetheless provide a general guideline to follow and more importantly, illustrates that doing too much too frequently will negatively affect your gains as a result.

One thing to realize though is that in almost all scenarios in the previous graphs, gains were still made. It's just that they were slowed down when additional cardio was added, meaning that if your main goal is to drop fat while maintaining your muscle, then exceeding the prior recommendations is perfectly fine and is something I'll even do when I'm cutting. But on the other hand, if your main goal right now is to pack on muscle and build strength, then you can see how too much cardio quickly becomes counterproductive.

Now, I am pretty sure, you guys certainly have a curiosity that how cardio helps in gains doing after weight training? Here, I have an answer. During weight training and till the end you increase metabolic insurgence into muscles cells. During concentric and eccentric movements these metabolites get a type of subsidence. What cardio does actually after performing weight training is that cardio increases heart activity and heart rate increases. Due to it heart starts pumping blood very frequently. This effect spares up metabolites in muscles cells to maximum. This sparing effect of metabolites in muscles cells has an anabolic effect to muscles cells which ensures muscle hypertrophy 

thus helps in muscle gain. 

Eight types of proven fasting methods

Today I'm going to talk about the different types of fast that you can do because there's a lot of different variations that you can try and still get good results and it's coming right up. A fasting period is defined as any period of time that you're not eating. So in the classic definition you're really only allowed water and if you take anything else by definition that is breaking your fast.

However when we do fasting there can be lots of different reasons. You can try and do it to lose weight, you can do it for controlling your blood sugars, there's lots of different reasons why you might fast and in those circumstances you can allow certain things into your fast that are going to make it easy. So in this week's video I'm going to cover different variations of fasting that you can try that might make it easier to sustain the fast and therefore get good results in terms of what you're aiming for.

The classic fast only allows water with nothing else and there's lots of ways that you can still add some flavor to the water and still make it taste good. So you can try lemon or lime for example, you can squeeze the lemon in and drop it in. There's lots of the flavorful oils in the skin or the rind that can make it taste good.

You can infuse herbs into it so mint is very popular, cucumber is very good and then you can also infuse fruit flavors. So if you use something like strawberries for example you can cut them up, put them in water, let them steep overnight and you'll get the flavor of the strawberry with very little calories still. Apple cider vinegar is another thing you can add to water and while it's still just water only it has a little bit of that tanginess some people find it's very helpful in terms of suppressing hunger.

So those are the classic water fasts. There are however many other different ways to do it. Number two is dry fasting and this is used classically in certain types of religious fasting and dry fasting does not even allow water.

So it is limited in the amount of time you can do it. Certainly anything over 24 hours is not recommended and many people get thirsty long before that. Taking something to drink often makes it easier to fast so the dry fasting some people find a little harder but surprisingly some people find it easier and there's a reason for that.

When fat is being metabolized it actually breaks down and water is released. This is one of the reasons why bears for example will hibernate all winter and they're not drinking any water. So you might wonder how they're getting their water, why they're not getting dehydrated and it's because the metabolism of the fat will actually release a little bit of water.

During fasting what can sometimes happen is people may find that they're urinating a lot. As you fast the insulin levels go down and insulin tends to hold water within our bodies so when we fast that insulin level allows that water to come out. So some people get a lot of urine and some people even get diarrhea and they find it very bothersome and in this situation that's where dry fasting for a short period of time might be very useful to make it easier for you.

The other interesting thing is some people find that their hunger is much less when they do a fast compared to a water only or a flavored water fast and if it works for you there's no reason not to do it but again I stress that anything longer than 24 hours is not recommended because you do get dehydrated very quickly. Number three is a tea fast. So in addition to allowing flavored waters and waters you also allow herbal teas and also teas with no other cream or sweeteners.

So no artificial sweeteners, no artificial flavors but green teas, black teas, oolong teas. There's also other variations like herbal teas which are not real teas because they don't have the tea leaf. They're herbs so mint teas, chamomile teas, cinnamon for example.

They're all very good. There are other varieties which you can get now like mushroom teas which some people find very useful as well. Because they don't have any calories and because they also have no effect on insulin as you fast your body is going to metabolize the glucose in your body so your glucose often gets better and then you're going to metabolize fat so you will find that you can lose weight and the tea or the herbal tea may make it a lot easier.

The fourth variant you can try is allowing coffee. So black coffees are good and it contains a lot more caffeine than teas so some people find it very useful and also a lot of people are very addicted to or used to having coffee in their system so that they find it very useful to maintain that normal rhythm when they're eating or when they're fasting. So coffee and a little bit of cream is okay.

Both teas and coffees when it's hot are great as ice variations as well. The fifth type of variation is bone broth and bone broth is clearly a type of food in that it has proteins, often it has fats and also some calories. However the amount is very small so while it's not a true fast you can use it to help suppress the hunger, you can use it to go longer periods of time and by doing that you can sometimes get excellent results in terms of blood sugars and weight loss.

Homemade broths are what we recommend here using bone. If you don't want to use bones you can use vegetable broths but try to avoid canned broths that tend to have a lot of processing, bouillon cubes, MSG, that kind of thing. It's better to make your own and use the bones, use the vegetables, use herbs.

Some people also add some vinegar into the mix as well. The sixth type of fasting is fat fasting and we talk about this a lot where we use high fat foods well again not a true fast do allow some people to do very well in terms of their weight loss. The fat really helps suppress the hunger and because it's also very satiating and you can sometimes still lose a lot of weight on these high fat diets it is sometimes very useful.

Bulletproof coffee is a type of fat fasting because you have the coffee and then usually a large amount of oil or butter or MCT oil so therefore it really classifies it as a food. There's a significant number of calories there and that can sometimes do very well. We have heard lots of people say they've done great on that.

The seventh type of fasting is the five to two fasting which was popularized by Dr. Mosley in the UK and it has five normal days of eating and two days of fasting which is not a true fast but he allows 500 calories during that day of so clearly it's not limiting by time but on those two days it's an ultra low calorie day and again that is sometimes a great strategy for some people to use with a lot of success. The eighth type of fast is what can be sometimes called a fiber fast where you're just allowing very very high fiber foods such as chia seeds for example so chia seeds you can put them in some liquid and they will bloom up form sort of a gel and you can put a little bit of flavoring in that and when you eat it it makes you full but there's a lot of fiber in there so it sort of takes up a lot of space and keeps you full and if it allows you to do more of the regular fasting then sometimes the net benefit is there. So those are eight different types of fasts that you can do.

There's lots more other ways to vary it including the the amount of time you're fasting but these are ways you can change what is allowed during the fast and by doing that you might find that one strategy really works for you and if it works great go ahead and use it if not you can change and try different other things. The key is to see what works for yourself because we're all different. 

Four proven Strategies to finish your workout within 30 minutes effectively and efficiently

Is it possible to work out half as much as you are right now, do just a few 30-minute workouts per week, and build just as much, if not more muscle? According to the latest science, yes. There's three time-saving strategies that have been shown to be most effective. I'll show you how to properly apply them to your workouts to get more gains in less time.

So the first strategy has to do with your workout volume. During a workout, the first few sets you do for a muscle give the most gains. But as you do more and more sets, you get less growth relative to the additional effort you're putting in.

Eventually, you actually reach a point where you don't get any additional growth from doing more sets, and may even result in muscle loss if you take it way too far. So to save time in the gym, you want to do the least number of sets that still gets you a solid return in gains. And there's a few studies we can look at to find what that amount is.

One study from back in 2002 had trained subjects do just one set of bench press and one set of leg press three times a week for 12 weeks. Despite the extremely low volume, in this case just 3 sets per muscle per week, they were still able to build a bit of muscle. Another study took a different approach.

They had subjects do 27 sets for their quads every single week. After 4 months, they measured how much muscle was built, and then split the subjects into one of three groups. One group dropped their volume to just 9 sets per week, another dropped to just 3 sets per week, and the final group didn't lift at all.

After 8 months at this new volume, the no lifting group's muscles returned back to normal, the 3 set per week group were able to maintain their new gains, whereas the 9 set per week group ended up gaining even more muscle. Now the last study I want to look at before providing some recommendations is a meta-analysis led by Brad Schoenfeld. They compared 1-5, 5-9, and 10 plus sets per muscle per week.

What they discovered is a dose response relationship between muscle growth and the number of sets performed, with 10 plus sets per muscle per week resulting in the most growth. But what's interesting is that the 5-9 set group still experienced about 80% of the max gains, and the 1-5 set group were still able to get about 60% of it. So based on the research we have so far, it seems likely that 3 sets per muscle per week is probably enough to maintain your gains and maybe even build a little muscle depending on how inexperienced you are.

But 4-7 sets per muscle per week is likely the sweet spot to get the most gains with the least amount of time and effort. But for now, here's an example of what this could look like with a 3 day per week full body workout that would train each muscle with around 6 sets per week.

Assuming 2 minutes rest between sets and 1 minute transition time between exercises, the whole workout could be completed in as little as 30 minutes. And you can also just apply this strategy to your current routine by cutting down the number of sets and or exercises on all your workouts or just do so on days where you're busy or just not feeling it and need a quick workout. However, if you are going to go with this minimal volume, there's 3 things you need to start doing in all your workouts to continue making almost as much or possibly even more gains than you were before.

First off, research has shown that the closer you train to failure, the more growth you'll get but also the more fatigue you'll create. In your case, you don't have that many sets to recover from. So to get the most growth possible, every single set, you should be pushing at least 1-2 reps short of failure and even going all the way to failure on exercises where it's safe to do so.

Second, since you're only doing a limited number but effective exercises, your workout will be efficient for sure and it's crucial you pick the ones that are most likely to give the most gains. And there's a really exciting area of research called long muscle length training. Basically, it seems like some muscles may respond better to exercises that challenge them the most when they're in a stretched position.

Now, some of you may be wondering, what if I don't want to do less? What if I still want to train at the optimal volume and use others to cut down my time? Or what if I want to make my minimalist workout even more time efficient? This is where the next two time-saving strategies come in handy. So you've probably heard of supersets, where you do two exercises back to back with no rest. While this can cut your workout time down in half, most people don't do them properly and end up compromising their gains.

The key is to use what's known as compound supersets. This involves doing an exercise that works one muscle and then that works the opposite and associated muscles. This way, one we can target different muscles or muscles groups while working on one muscle. 

One study showed that keeping the transition time as short as possible, no longer than a minute, led to a unique benefit where subjects could actually do more reps than they could when they took longer rest or just performed the exercises without supersets. However, keep in mind that supersets will only work if you're still pushing your muscles close to failure every set.

So just take as long as rest as you need to prevent your cardio from holding you back.

You can basically superset any two exercises that train the same muscle group and wouldn't be overly fatiguing when done back to back.

Strategy 3, use a bit lighter weights to ensure better form, posture and an easy to perform mode. This will certainly disallow pitfalls and you can push or pull up to nicer rep range which will torture your muscles quickly and you don’t need to perform more sets. This will save your time and is effective as well. 

But with strategy 4, you do your first set until you can't do any more reps, decrease the weight and immediately do as many reps as you can, and continue dropping the weight until you complete about 2 or 3 drop sets in total.

Drop sets take advantage of what's commonly known as effective reps. Let's say you're doing a set of 10 reps to failure. The first few reps you do contribute very little to muscle growth.

It's the last few reps when the muscles are being pushed to their absolute limit where the most growth happens. So even though you're decreasing the weight during each drop set, your muscles are already exhausted from your previous set to the point that every additional  rep it does now is far more effective for growth. This is likely the mechanism behind why a handful of studies and a recent 2022 meta-analysis, which is basically a study of studies, have all shown drop sets to provide the same and in some cases even more growth despite cutting workouts down to a third of the time.

But you should only use this on certain exercises. Keep in mind that during every set, you have to train to failure. So you need to use exercises where it's safe to do so and also really quick to decrease the weight for each drop set.

Lateral raises, arms exercises, dumbbell chest presses, calf raises, and many machine exercises are all great options. I wouldn't apply this to squats and deadlifts and only would bench press if you have a good spotter. Now as for how many drop sets to do, one study replaced 3 normal sets with 1 normal set followed by 2 drop sets, whereas another study replaced 3 normal sets with 1 normal set followed by 4 drop sets.

In both studies, the drop set group led to similar growth as the normal group. So I'd say try to at least match the total number of sets including your drop sets with how many normal sets you usually do. Lastly, as for how much to lower the weight during each drop set, the study protocol is usually decreased by 20% at a time.

So don't drop by too much or too little. You probably won't be able to do as many reps as you could do during the previous set, but you should definitely be able to get more than a few. Just make sure you're still tracking how much weight and how many reps you're doing and try to progress this over time just like you would with normal sets.

Are you guys going through intermittent fasting?

What if I told you there was a diet that gets better fat loss with less muscle loss, improved cardiovascular health, and better glucose control, all with less hunger, and without much risk of disordered eating or body image concerns? Well, to many people, that's exactly what so-called intermittent fasting represents. I call it so-called because in the scientific literature, you don't really see it go by that name. Instead, you have alternate day fasting, where you eat one day and fast the next day, and time-restricted feeding, where you fast for 16 to 20 hours with a 4 to 8 hour eating window.

In practice, many adherents follow the lean gains protocol, popularized by Martin Burkhand, where you fast for 16 hours with an 8 hour eating window centered around weight training. As it turns out, fasting has many benefits, but they've mainly been seen in rats, where intermittent fasting causes better weight loss, improved cardiovascular health, neuroprotective effects, decreased cancer risk, and increased lifespan, and many of these effects are independent of caloric restriction alone. It's not fully understood why fasting has these positive health effects, but one theory is that periodic food deprivation serves as a sort of preconditioning stress, one that allows for resistance to bigger stresses in the future.

It's kind of like exposing yourself to stressful germs can enhance immunity and protect against future stresses down the road. Human studies have fared pretty well too. Two studies showed weight loss, reduced blood pressure, and lowered cholesterol in obese subjects following an alternate day fasting diet for 8 to 10 weeks.

However, two similar studies on lean individuals showed weight maintenance, indicating that alternate day fasting may be a better weight loss strategy for obese folks. And as relatively short duration trials, it's difficult to say how this approach would fare over the long term. Many expressed skepticism over rampant hunger with this approach, but one study in obese patients following a 14 day fast found very impressive weight loss without an increase in hunger.

And this is a recurring theme across this body of research. Fasting can have an appetite blunting effect, and we tend to get hungry when we're used to eating. So while there may be an adjustment period when first switching to intermittent fasting, where you're more hungry than usual, maintaining a regular eating pattern will help control hunger with any diet, regardless of eating frequency.

The biggest systematic review to date, looking at 40 studies, found that while intermittent fasting was better at suppressing hunger than just continuous caloric restriction, this wasn't able to translate into significantly improved body composition or weight loss. The authors conclude that intermittent fasting represents a valid, albeit apparently not superior option to continuous energy restriction for weight loss. As a bodybuilder, one worry is that all this fasting would cause muscle to fall off.

Don't you need to eat every two hours to keep the muscle anabolic? Actually, a 2006 paper showed that even 40 hours of fasting didn't significantly alter negative regulators of muscle mass and didn't cause any significant muscle atrophy. Furthermore, even a 24-hour fast only decreases liver glycogen by less than half, meaning muscle glycogen is completely spared. And the ketone bodies that you typically see in association with alternate day fasting also spare skeletal muscle from breakdown.

Don't you need to eat like six meals a day in order to speed up your metabolism? And won't fasting slow your metabolism down? This myth is based on the correct idea that the thermic effect of food increases following a meal. However, current science indicates that this increase is proportional to the caloric content of the meal, not meal frequency per se. And changes in metabolic rate come from changes in daily caloric intake, not from changes in meal timing.

One good argument against intermittent fasting comes from a 2013 study which showed that anabolic signaling was greater when consuming four 20-gram doses of whey protein compared to two doses of 40 grams or eight doses of 10 grams, implying that from a muscle protein synthetic perspective, protein spaced more evenly throughout the day across roughly four meals may be better for optimizing anabolism. Another consideration is whether intermittent fasting is psychologically healthy. Despite the fact that research from Hadi and colleagues showed that intermittent fasting reduced depression and binge eating, the Canadian Pediatric Society classifies fasting and skipping meals as unhealthy strategies for adolescents.

So for kids and teenagers, this may not be the most suitable approach. To conclude, intermittent fasting has certainly shown itself to be an impressive and effective dieting methodology. In my opinion, it hasn't shown much merit over more standard diets that impose a caloric deficit with sufficient protein intake.

But for those who find it to fit their preferences better and lifestyle better, fasting just may be the way to go. And ultimately, I think the best diet is the one to which you can best adhere.

Instinctual Training

Today I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the value of instinctual training. Now in this world right now, let's talk a little holistically, we got a lot of insanity going on, a lot of insanity in the world. And this insanity really is when people worship an idea rather than something that actually works.

So they're involved in some sort of fantasy land in their head instead of what's actually going on here in this moment. And this is the value of instinctual training. So you can have a program, you can have a template, and I'm assuming that you have discipline.

I'm assuming that you already have discipline not just give up working out just because you're lazy, right? You're not just basically saying, I'm not going to go to the gym today just because I'm a little bit tired or I feel a little fatigued, you know, basically, you know, all the tricks that sometimes you tell yourself to make sure you don't have to do leg day, right? Now the thing is, the value of instinctual training is that even though you may have a template such as a workout program, and I think this is great, it's good to have an overall recipe or plan or a map in what you're doing. But at the same time, you're also paying attention first and foremost to what's going on in your body in that day. So say you have a plan to go do bench presses, but your shoulder's just killing you, or maybe you're extremely sore, and then maybe it's better to do inclines instead of bench.

Or maybe you want to do another exercise altogether, or maybe you want to concentrate more on your rear delts or your shoulder training instead of your chest training that day. That's okay. Because really, reality, reality has to be the most important foundation on which your entire life sits, not just your training.

Reality should take the forefront of your attention. So whatever's happening in your body, that is the most important thing to pay attention to. And then you may have some input with your training program here and there.

So if you go to squat, but you notice your lower back is just feeling absolutely horrible that day. And you know that if you squat today you might tweak or herniate a disc. Well, guess what? Maybe it's a better day to do some lunges.

Maybe it's a better day to do some leg presses, or maybe it's a better day to avoid legs altogether and do some light arm training or something. So this is okay. Because the thing is, is that your body's saying, here's where I've been stimulated and I've been stimulated enough.

And here's where maybe I need some more stimulation in order to recover. Now, of course, again, if you feel tweaky all over, maybe you decide to take a day off. I'm basking in the sunshine.

But you're making a decision to not train based on the reality, based on what your body's showing you instead of something that you're overlaying or projecting on top of the situation, right? You might be lazy today because you don't want to go to the gym. Then tomorrow you're lazy again. And the next day you're lazy again.

Well, guess what? If you're lazy in every single circumstance, it's you projecting that experience. It's not necessarily the experience that the environment and reality is showing you in this moment, right? So I know you guys most likely know the difference, but in case you don't, that's, that's maybe a way to discern this, right? The thing is with instinctual training, it's great because you can basically make decisions in your training, which are going to assist you with going further in your training instead of just like a bird in a window, always flying right into that window over and over again and not getting anywhere. So don't be afraid to deviate from your plan from time to time.

It may reveal new possibilities or new discoveries to you in your training and may help you make more gains than before. Because so often, like I learned in my training too, you can only be as good as your weakest link. So sometimes say if your rear delts are too weak or your rotator cuff muscles are too weak, perhaps your bench press just can't go up because you have another weak link that needs to be addressed first and foremost.

Sometimes, unfortunately, sometimes the weak link is actually structural and you need surgery in order to take care of that weak link, such as my case where I'm bench pressing kind of sideways just because the way my shoulders sit from the hockey injuries that I got, right? So the thing is sometimes the weak link is structural and there's really nothing you can do about it if you're not willing to get surgery and you have to work around that. So somebody else's template might not be right for you either, right? So somebody might say, hey, this is what you do in your circumstance, but they might not know much about your individual circumstance when it comes down to injury history or a certain type of affliction that your body may have. This is where instinctual training comes in really handy because you may have an individual circumstance that is not necessarily so common.

So a lot of the information out there has to do with all these other circumstances, but not yours. So now you have to use your instincts to find out what is the proper path for you. I'm showing you the path.

It's you who must walk through it. So in the end, you have to find your own path. You start with a template, but you may have individual sort of situations pop up where you have to start your own path or find your own path, find your own recipe to make the most amount of gains and keep your health as intact as possible.

Obviously living up to the expectations of other people can be a very slippery slope. So you don't want to drive yourself into an area which is just causing you damage and not necessarily helping you in the long run with your health and with your fitness level. So yeah, instinctual training might be the thing for you.

Try it out. If you feel like a little bit too sore or too tight in some area, or you feel like, hey, something else just feels flaccid, there's not as much of a pump in that area, or maybe it needs a little bit of work. Try something new, try a new exercise, try a new angle, maybe work on a little bit more, maybe work on something a little bit less.

Mountain. Sometimes by addressing these weak links, you can make more (gains overall, and that's really what you're after. So I hope this helps you out with your training.