Hi Friend,
Happy last day of the year to you! You did it. You made it. Another year in the books. High Five. #ThatFeelsGreat! And tomorrow, "Oh Boy!", you get to turn the page to a New Year. That's exciting. The 1st day of 2024. #True.
#Also True. Today is the last day of 2023. Yet, they're both the same, not just because their back to back days, but because they're both the 1st time in your history that they've been experienced. Never, not never have I ever (wouldn't that be a fun game to play), but never have you ever lived and experienced, December 31st 2023. Nor will you have ever experienced January 1st 2024. Both new. Brand new, fresh out of the box.
Sure you have a lifetime of December 31st's and a lifetime of January 1st's, but not today's and not tomorrow's. You do have a ton of life experience with 12/31's and 1/1's, and what an opportunity it is to practice, "if I only knew then, what I know now".
Everyday is both brand new and a day / moment (mostly) you've repeated in your life in some ways. You get to use what you've learned since then, now. How fantastic. How lucky. You're still young. You're still learning. You have experience. You have time. You can take action so that the next time this similar day and moment, though not brand new, happens again, you can reflect on how it's been since the last time when you implemented some of your experience into an action.
Anyways, sorry for going so deep on you. I really wrote to tell you about Building Muscle and Walking, but I needed an intro, and I couldn't quite figure out the story of my family was sick during vacation so it changed our plans, so I tried to work, but that only worked so well, so here I am getting philosophical while trying to share something cool I just learned.
Here goes:
I just finished a course on The Science and Development of Hypertrophy by Brad Schoenfeld. It was excellent. Wanna build muscles? It's a great one. Youth. Novice. Athletes. Experienced. Older. Seniors. Team Sports. Field & Court Sports. Individual Sports. Endurance Sports. Power Sports. Weightlifting and exercise only. Check. All of them.
An interesting tidbit I wanted to share, was the chapter on aerobic training and muscle hypertrophy. There were so many nuggets that pertained to people who strength train and particularly my target audience (30-60 year olds) for group personal training. The one I wanted to share today was for those who want to build muscle. I have all of my clients do "cardio minutes", for health, body transformation and performance, but how does cardio impact and/or compliment hypertrophy?
Hypertrophy
Hypertrophy is an increase in the size of muscle tissue. It is important because the opposite is atrophy. Atrophy is wasting away, decline in effectiveness or vigor due to underuse or neglect. Ouch. Think frail people. Think sedentary. Think injured. No fun. Nobody wants this to happen to them even if it's a part of life. Let's delay it as much as possible.
So. Hypertrophy is when you grow your muscles from soft to firm, weak to strong, injury prone to durable, dependent to cable, frail to resilient, tired to energized, clumsy to athletic, helpless to capable, sad to happy, low self-esteem to confident. Boring to fun! No to yes!
Now. If you want to build muscle or specifically hypertrophy muscle as a sole goal, lift weights and do no cardio.
However, cardio is important as you've heard, so if you're going to do it and your sole focus is to hypertrophy your muscles, then just walk. Preferably on it's own day, or after resistance training or as much as 6 hours before (long enough that there's no residual fatigue from walking) resistance training.
That's it. Your welcome. You may have already known this or felt this, but there it is.
If you want to build muscle either:
Resistance Train and don't do cardio.
Resistance Train and do low intensity cardio (e.g. walking), but do it...
On it's own day,
on the same day, but after resistance training (and not for too long to reduce the anabolic state)
or before resistance training so long as there's no residual fatigue.
There you go. Generally speaking, if you want to build muscle and do aerobic cardio concurrently, the either walk or do other low intensity cardio or not any at all, when resistance training to build muscle.
Happy last day of the year and Happy New Year to you!
Make it count,
Mike
p.s. If you want to transform atrophied muscles to hypertrophied ones and you want help with it, training begins, Tuesday, January 2, 2024. You can learn more here.
