Many people overlook the importance of cardio when they think of building muscle. They think that lifting weights and taking supplements is all there is to it.

If you just do this, you’ll blow up like a hot air balloon but you won’t have any definition in your muscles.

This is because the diet that goes along with building muscle requires you to eat a lot in your “bulk phase”. Eating a lot, even if it’s good calories, will lead to excess carb storage (which leads to fat, which leads to less muscular definition).

That being said, you need a good cardio program in place to keep your fat gain to a minimum while you’re bulking up. Which leaves the question, what type of cardio is best?

If you’ve been around anytime in the past decade or so, you’ll know that interval cardio beats steady state cardio hands down any day for most purposes. Here’s a few reasons why.

1. Stimulates the release of Growth Hormone that is vital to building muscle.

2. Interval training increases your metabolism and post-exercise oxygen consumption which has been shown to burn fat for 24 hours after the interval workout.

3. Burns a HECK of a lot more overall calories (if done at the proper time) than long steady state cardio.

4. Trains Type II muscle fibers, the same ones used in weight training.

With this in mind, high intensity interval cardio over a short period of time does burn a lot of calories. So does low intensity cardio over a long period of time, but low intensity cardio will make your body more efficient (that means burn less) at burning fat, which is what we don’t want.

That being said, I’ll now list a great example of high intensity interval training to do while you’re bulking up. This is one I like to follow myself.

A. 5 min warm up

B. Followed by 1 min sprint, then 1 min jog, while increasing the speed each sprint. Perform 5-10 sprints

C. Follow this with a 5 min cool down.

Perform this workout on alternate days of weight training days because this is a tough workout that taps into your glycogen stores. If your glycogen stores are already depleted from lifting, you’ll be tapping into protein and stripping muscle. You definitely don’t want to do that!

So I hope you’re including cardio into your weight training work out. It has many more benefits than I’ve outlined before and, if done right, actually promotes muscle gain.