Will doing all cardio on exercise bike overtrain legs?

[Sicdog]

Hi Jay,

I am going to start cutting soon for my 12 week transformation as I have now put on quite a bit of fat.

Just wondering if using only an exercise bike for cardio will stop any further muscular gain or even cause muscle loss to my legs.

What do you think?


Sicdog

[JayBon]

It shouldn't.

I was wondering exactly the same question prior to my challenge. My concern was that when you train your legs during resistance training, you effectively lower the amino acid availability to your leg muscles. Stress hormones are released. Your leg muscles go into a catabolic state. You stop and feed yourself to put your leg muscles into an anabolic state.

By doing cardio, you are effectively doing a similar thing - you will be incuding a catabolic state whilst performing your exercise. A number one factor to muscle hypertrophy is resting the muscles.

By training legs in the morning and then cardio in the afternoon, I once read that a study determined that your cortisol levels can be increased by four times! Thats bad news - as coritsol, a stress hormone, is responsible for muscle catabolism.

Now, the question remains, will the amount of catabolism result in a net leg muscle gain or loss?

Because the leg muscles are so strong relative to most of your other muscle groups, a large amount of overload can be placed upon them resulting in some big gains. As with many other bodybuilders I have spoken to, legs just seem to grow. Personally this seems to be the case with me, as no matter how much cardio I have done, I have still received some huge leg gains. For example, during my BodyBlitz challenge:

Week 6 - Cardio 7/week:

Incline Leg Press (low foot) 250kg x 5
Squats 100kg x 6

Week 10 - Cardio 10/week:

Incline Leg Press (low foot) 300kg x 6
Squats 115kg x 4

From week 6 - 10 I did A LOT of cardio on the bike and look at those gains. That said, everyone is different, but EXPECT to have strength and hypertrophy gains - so long as your diet is in tact and you are resting adequately.

Also worth noting, when you are incorporating excessive cardio into your training, your gains may often not be as big as whilst bulking.

[Sicdog]

Thanks for the reply Jay.

Did you measure your legs though?

It is very possible to gain a lot of strength in lifts but not gain muscular size.




Thanks

Sicdog.

[JayBon]

True that.

Now the thing is that I tend to carry a lot of fat around the thigh area - so in week 6 versus week 10, there is going to be a great deal of circumference difference due to fat loss. There is no doubt that my thigh circumference was smaller at the end of my challenge - but this is due to a loss of about 12% body fat - from 18% down to 6%. Unfortunately I don't have any measurements available (this is something I wish I recorded).

So honestly speaking I had huge strength gains and it is impossible to quantitatively give you an accurate answer as to how much hypertrophy I experienced in my quads, hammies and glutes.

[beegeener]

I did squats on Monday.. and I havent been able to walk or run since.. and it's Thursday now!
I would just say take it easy... I learnt my lesson!!

[Andj]

as above me too!

Severe pain - I did a slow jog on Tuesday night and I think that I just aggrevated it more. Learnt my lesson - don't compund inflammation in legs!

[JayBon]

Really? You know from my experience I have felt cardio has helped the DOMS following a legs session.