"Roger Zoul" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...
Quoted message said:Steve Freides said:"Roger Zoul" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...Quoted message said:Steve Freides <[email hidden]> wrote:
>
> I believe that weight lifting while losing weight is important in
> maintaining muscle mass because you are, in effect, telling your
> body that you still need the muscle you've got. The advice the OP
> received
> about avoiding doing "too much cardio" sounds correct to me. I do
> precious little of it now.I thought you were into cycling? Maybe I have you confused with
someone
else.I love cycling (and running), but my body likes weight lifting much
better. Last summer, my riding consisted of lots of short jaunts
around town with the occasional 20-miler thrown in every couple of
weeks and nothing more than that. It will probably be the same this
summer as well.FWIW, I've found my strength/endurance work with kettlebells provides
a lot of carry-over to the bike and running for relatively short
distances, e.g., things like a 20 mile bike ride which is a short
jaunt for anyone who rides a lot. For longer distances, I need to
put in the mileage on the bike, but for what I do lately, a regular
diet of kettlebell swings and snatches keeps me ready to ride (or,
for that matter, run and swim) without much in the way of regular
sport-specific training - for example, my resting pulse remains in
the low 40's and I do no regular cycling, no regular running, and my
swimming consists of 400-600 yards once a week. I might get out and
run a mile or two once every week or two but it's nothing more than
that, maybe 10 minutes on a bicycle wind trainer every couple of
weeks as well.To get back to the original point, I'm working on increasing my limit
strength - kettlebell strength/endurance work does not get in the way
of my strength gains but more traditional cardio did and would again
if I did a lot of it, I'm sure. And the kettlebell work provides
excellent grip training that has had a real carryover to my deadlift,
and keeps my shoulders healthy (repetitive full ROM in a few
directions) and my hamstrings flexible (the lack of which is a
chronic problem for many runners and cyclists). For most people, if
a competition at an endurance sport isn't their goal but lower body
fat and improved strength and possibly additional muscle is, focusing
on resistance training and doing regular cardio but not "too much" is
a good thing. My personal experience has been that, the older I get,
the more important strength training is to keep me in the kind of
good health I want to be in. In my 20's, 30's, and even most of my
40's, running and biking were enough.I'm certainly in sync with you on resistance training, but I would
have
thought that the downsides of enjoyable forms of endurnace work (ie,
cycling, running, and swimming) could be counteracted by simply eating
more
food. In other words, keep at the resistance work and do the
enjoyable
cardio forms of exercise, but eat to offset them causing muscle loss.Is there some reason this isn't possible? Perhaps you don't like to
eat?
20-miles on a bike ride isn't quite enough for me. But, like you, I
do have
to put more effort in to make it easier, so maybe that's your issue:
time
to train up.
I will leave the reasons _why_ a lot of cardio interferes with gains in
limit strength to those who know more than me. I can ride for hours and
hours and deadlift maybe just under 2x bodyweight without much
difficulty, but getting much above that doesn't work if I'm doing a lot
of cardio. Like I said, hopefully Elzi, Keith, or someone else will
chime in here.
As to giving up what you enjoy, I'm not doing that. I enjoy all these
things, including riding the bike and lifting heavy weights. I'm riding
as much as I want to, and I'm enjoying making progress at weights. One
of the nice things about weight training is that I can do it at home and
in a relatively short period of time - I've got school-aged kids and am
busy managing several simultaneous careers (if you can call them that) -
the days of my having hours to ride are likely gone until the kids are,
knock on wood, grown and out of here. The kettlebell cardio is very
time efficient and it's fun and challenging besides, so that's what I do
for the most part.