Should you banish aerobic training if you want to get jacked? Not at all. Check out this guest post from Michael Martin on why aerobic training is important to muscle growth.
Aerobic training is something that, traditionally, has been excluded by body builders and weight lifters that want to acquire as much strength and size as possible. However, as science turns back more and more layers of the human body, we’ve seen that aerobic exercise is in fact more and more important to the way that we build and maintain muscle. Here’s why!
1. Increased Energy Capacity
There are two ways that the body creates energy; aerobic and anaerobic. Aerobic requires oxygen, and it tends to come with prolonged, lesser expenditures of energy (jogging, cycling, etc.), and anaerobic doesn’t require oxygen, but it’s used for heavy, sudden actions (like single reps of heavy lifts). If you work on your aerobic capacity, then you will develop an increased energy capacity, as practically everything that the body does when it comes to work is a combination of these two energy processes. You’ll never use wholly one or wholly the other, and they increase each other too.
2. Tone
If you want to work on expanding muscle growth, you have to work muscle groups from many different angles. After all, bench press is a good start, but chest flies, push ups and other exercises will also be necessary to give that muscle group a full tone. Aerobic exercise will keep your muscle groups toned too, and it will ensure that the entire body works together as a whole. After all, when you lift weights, you tend to focus on a single group of muscles, whereas aerobic tends to focus on at least half your body, if not the whole thing at once.
3. Maintenance
Aerobic exercise is there to maintain your muscle health for the long haul. When your heart rate increases, your blood flows faster, carrying more oxygen to your tissues and in general stimulating your body so that you can more easily maintain and build your muscle up. While aerobic exercise won’t bulk you up the way that weight lifting does, it will make sure that your new muscles are healthy, hearty and able to handle strain for long periods of time.
4. Aerobic Exercise Burns Fat
One major goal of most weight lifters is to get a sleek, cut physique… but that can be frustrating if you still have a thin layer of fat over all that hard-earned muscle. Aerobic exercise will burn that fat away, if done in the proper amounts to fit in with your weight lifting program. High Intensity Interval Training is one example. Here, you do fast bursts of aerobic activity for a short period of time to help set your fat on a low burn. It also helps you keep your fast twitch muscles ready and toned for action. Now, too much aerobic exercise just by itself can cause a loss of muslce mass, but just enough is a very good thing.
Visual Impact Cardio
If you are looking for state of the art information on aerobic training to add to your workouts, check out Visual Impact Cardio.
Rusty rocks the conventional boat again with this program and challenges conventional wisdom with info like…
How Stubborn Body Fat is more sensitive to insulin, less sensitive to adrenaline, and has less blood flow compared to “regular” body fat.
These are only a few of the ways that aerobic training can help you get in shape and keep your muscle mass pumping. The best way to describe it though is that aerobic exercise is the yin to weight lifting’s yang. You need both of them to create a complete whole of healthy and efficient muscle growth!
About the Author: Michael Martin Hopes to attend graduate school or journalism and write about international affairs for the rest of his life. Has traveled all over Africa, and hopes to live in Laos someday. He writes about fitness, saving money & frequenting www.termlifeinsurance.org.
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