Cardiovascular exercise to gain weight?

Hey guys, over the past year and a bit of training I have heard mixed views on the effect of cardiovascular exercise when trying to gain weight. Some people say cut it out completely others say it’s vital, this obviously means that different people experience different results, as with all things in life. I therefore tried all sorts of different training types, until I found something that worked for me.

As you may know I am naturally slender so it doesn’t really seem to make much sense to do much cardio as I am trying to gain weight.  This couldn’t be further from the case, I trained for 2 months without cardio and found I ended up gaining weight slower and built more fat than I wanted.  When I trained with 15mins of cardio before a session and 20mins after I found I put on lean muscle so much faster. How could this be?

As you know to gain weight you need to absorb nutrients from your food and convert it into muscle fibres. If you can’t do this very well then your body can be said to be inefficient. If something is more efficient it is going to give better results in general. When you do cardio you are increasing the efficiency of your body, blood vessels are going to work better, as well as your digestive system. If you can get nutrients circulating around your body more effectively you can recover faster and train harder, getting you the results faster. Cardio is proven to increase your metabolism, and if like myself you are consuming huge amounts of protein this is important to get the most out of your food.

A good time to do cardio is in the morning as it instantly increases your metabolism so for the rest of the day your food is digested more efficiently.

So what do I recommend? Try training for 15mins before a session, remember cardio vascular does not mean run as hard as you can on the treadmill. You want to keep your heart rate at 55-75% of it’s maximum.  Then finish of a session with another 20mins, make sure you consume plenty of fluids during your session. For during workout nutrition please visit my post on it here.

If you have any questions leave them in the comment section below and I will get back to you. If you want to see my story and progress please visit the About page.