Arnold was a big fan of supersetting chest and back exercises, as well as bicep and triceps.
I’ve seen Paul Carter recommend it.
Nothing like trying it for yourself. I did and honestly, I like it.My lifts don’t seem to suffer, performance wise. Quite the contrary, sometimes. Should be noticed that I end up resting more between sets. Instead of resting, say, two minutes between chest exercises, you do your chest set, rest, do your back set, rest, do your chest set again. Might be 5 minutes between chest exercises.
I feel like it evens up.
When I really hate doing it (most of the time) my blood pressure and resting heart rate respond pretty well to something as simple and easy as 10 minutes of bike/ elliptical before and after my lifting.
The reason I decided to do cardio was to help drop my percent body fat as low as possible for a bodybuilding contest. From this reason, I planned doing my cardio as far from the times that I lifted weights as was practical. I never did cardio close to the time I lifted weights. If I was 12 weeks out from a contest I started doing cardio at 6:00am and started lifting weights at 4:30pm. If I needed more than 45 minutes of cardio, I added a second cardio time slot around 9:00pm.
BTW, I was not doing cardio for any health reason. I am not suggesting that you should do as I did, but only that I placed cardio at times that I thought optimized burning fat and allowing muscles to be completely feed around the weight lifting session.
I only did low impact cardio, because I was only concerned with body fat reduction, and not conditioning. I never felt that I lacked sufficient conditioning for the method of lifting weights that I did. I don’t know if I was correct, but I thought high intensity cardio would negatively affect muscle building ability. Plus, I am a little bit comfort leaning and tend toward pain avoidance. So why “hurt” both lifting weights and doing cardio?
I did my normal full body session yesterday but super setted it with antagonist pairings. It saved about 13 minutes compared to doing it with normal sets and it was subjectively a lot harder. I probably could have moved a bit faster, but not much without turning it into a cardio session. No way I could have done it in half the time.
5 total sets of each exercise, 2 working sets on everything but the pull-ups (those I just did roughly the same reps for each set). I ended up resting 60-75 seconds between exercises, mostly to get my heart rate back under 100. I had no drop off in performance with the weights, so I guess from that perspective its a win.
I wouldn’t do high intensity cardio either before or after lifting. I think low intensity cardio after lifting is fine. Ideally you’d do it on another day or in a separate session on the same day as others have mentioned, but if that doesn’t work for you then I wouldn’t sweat doing it after lifting.
Normally I do rest quite a bit longer when doing normal sets. Yesterday I experimented with the super set idea (though I guess technically not a super set if I rested between exercises).
There are solid health reasons to increase your VO2 max. Cardio is one way to do this. You can do it with lifting and limited cardio too. I do most of my cardio on days when I don’t lift much, since I am aging. Getting as big as possible was always less important to me than getting stronger, but more so now. I prioritize maintaining strength in an efficient way which maintains technical skills but minimizes injury risk. I compete against myself, though.
Since this is a tangent to the thread I have no further comments, but this graph is important. Fitness does not just imply strength. The graph shows the highly fit 75 year old dude (top 5%) is dramatically fitter than the unfit 25 year old dude (bottom 5%).
Really asking: what would be your concern with high intensity cardio after a lift? Is it more on the side that you can’t bring enough intensity to be effective or more about additional CNS fatigue digging a deeper recovery hole?
Personally, I do it after lifting because I want to save the most of my energy for lifting. The reason I was inquiring opinions is because I’ve seen some say not to do it after because it interferes with muscle protein synthesis after lifting.
