the 90 minute cardio rule

melkor has cited a rule of thumb that to gain muscle it is counterproductive to do more than 90 minutes of cardio per week.

I commute by bicycle to work, an easy 2 miles each way, and also use a bicycle for short errands. I rack up more than 90 minutes of "cardio" per week just in daily life.

Does this mean that if I ever wanted to build muscle I would need to drive more?? (this question is hypothetical at the moment given my current goals).

Please word this "rule" correctly for me.

It is being said here that over 90 minutes of cardio per week "burns" muscle.  Alternatively, you are saying that rather it interferes with building the maximum amount of muscle (1/4 to 1/2 a pound per week).  Which is it?  Can someone gain some muscle - less than the maximum - while training for speed and/or endurance? 

And, if that is the case, wouldn't the fears of the OP be unfounded even if her daily commute were a heart-pumping one?  Couldn't she still be building some muscle (less than the max)?

 For most people who aren't Trhawley, the fear of muscle loss is very much overrated - and even he only has to worry if he's going to go on one of his epic bike rides lasting more than 3 hours and fails to bring along enough carbs to fuel himself along the way - that's kind of the point of having Gatorade, energy gels or raisins. Converting protein to glucose through glucogenesis is energetically expensive and your body prefers to not do that unless there's no alternative.

 Well, your body always uses all three possible energy sources for fuel, carbs, fat and protein, but that's not muscle protein that gets ripped out of your existing muscle mass and burnt for fuel, that's just amino acids from your bloodstream unless you're swimming the English Channel and forgot your oatmeal that morning.

 But unless you're sloppy with the nutrition and do gi-normous amounts of cardio you're not going to be burning off muscle protein at an appreciable rate; we're talking grams here even in the unlikely situation that it becomes an issue.

 Okay, if you make a habit of burning off ten grams of muscle protein a day it's going to add up, but you are very unlikely to have that be a significant factor in your progres unless you've got Anorectica Athletica or similar disordered behaviour.

 However, your muscle gain depends on some biochemical trickery with muscular protein resynthesis, and this is significantly depressed for up to 8 hours following a bout of strenuous cardio, unless you get really anal-retentive about post-workout nutrition.

 But sure, it's completely possible to have some progress, and unless your specific goals include "maximum muscle gain in minimum time" there's probably very little reason to care that you're seeing submaximal gains, neh?

Original Post by melkor:

I haven't heard any guidelines from the other corners on the triangle, but I suspect that it's similar - more than 90 minutes of heavy lifting will probably interfere with a goal of gaining endurance or speed because your body is going to have to work hard to repair the 'damage' strength training causes.

Generally endurance training is a pattern of short- high endurance effort. For example, a runner might use short all-out sprints up hill in combination with longer low- medium runs. The point is to raise your lactic acid threshold. (If you can prolong the point at which you feel tired, you can go longer at a higher output).

I'm guessing that the links above will have some variation of this. I can also recommend a good book on endurance training specifically for rock climbing.

I think the controversy here lies in the many interpretations of what it means to be stronger.

Quite possibly - when I think in terms of strength training it's along the lines of my goal to deadlift twice my bodyweight and squat 1.5 times bodyweight, both for reps. To a competitve powerlifter my numbers are a joke, but I'm quite pleased with my 345lbs deadlift and 245lbs squat even if Andy Bolton and his 1245lbs deadlift considers my totals a light warmup.

 There's only a limited carryover from that kind of maximal strength training to strength endurance or speed-strength or any of the other mixes - none of the physical qualities are completely disjoint entities and you can put your personal training mix on any spot along the different axes. But the carryover between different physical dimensions is limited- even if I did feel like I got hit by a truck Sunday after my 2-hour bike ride Saturday, I doubt my squat or deadlift poundage increased any.

tom, thanks, I'll check out those links for winter cycling training. 

juliemae phrased the question most closely to what I intended.  If you do more than 90 minutes of cardio per week, does it make it somewhat less optimal for building muscle, or impossible, in the way that you can't build muscle in a calorie deficit unless you are genetically special. Sounds like the answer is "less optimal", and that's just fine for my non-body-builder goals. 

melkor, thanks for the berardi link. I can easily see being picky about post-workout nutrition if it helps.

vanessa, I'm pretty sure I'm not confusing what I mean by strength.  I'm interested in general fitness and being able to, say, hoist a suitcase onto a luggage rack as an aspect of general fitness.

I've got a variety of goals, and expect to focus on particular goal sets in a given season.  I never expect to optimize training for any single goal, and cross-training is healthier.   My goals are about general fitness, having fun, and hitting PRs, which requires focus but not optimization.

this thread was really interesting.  i myself am someone who tries to do it all, endurance and speed and strength.  my speed lags far behind.  but in terms of endurance and strength, they've only increased throughout my training (i started lifting seriously around november of '07). 

melkor makes a good point about choosing your focus IF you have a preference.  i mean, i wonder how much stronger i'd be w/o the cardio.  or how fast i'd be w/o the endurance training. 

but i dunno.  i think bryan clay's awesome.  i'll bet he trains very methodically to get results in all corners of the triangle.  i really respect being fit the way he is.

ok, here's more ascii art

       &nb sp;          goals/performance

       &nb sp;    /        &nb sp;               &nb sp;          \

       &nb sp;  /       &n bsp;        ;       &n bsp;        ;       \

       V       &n bsp;        ;       &n bsp;        ;       &n bsp;  V
health/fitness <-------------->  optimization

On the one end of the a scale is health and fitness.   This rewards balance among strength, power, endurance, flexibility.

On the other end is optimization. A competitive body builder or cyclist will emphasize the things that make them excel in their sport at the expense of general health and fitness.

Regardless of where you fit on that scale, in order to improve it is helpful to focus on some goals over others at any given time.  Someone whose objective is optimal health will cycle among a variety of areas to improve. Someone whose objectives include good health and some favorite activities will do a mix of training biased toward the favorite activities.  An elite athlete will be very heavily biased toward their sport.

Those of us who aren't elite athletes need to choose the areas where we want to focus at any given time.

i agree that focusing on one area at a given time would optimize results in that area.  however, i also think that over a long period of time and a careful approach to program training, one can make huge advances in all areas.  i mean, marathon runners don't just run far--they run fast!  they're running a mile in a little over 5 minutes, which is like sprinting for most ppl.  and though a gymnast/football player/other athlete may not be as strong as a powerlifter, they're definitely strong enough to be considered "elite" in the strength category.  so that's my point, i guess.  doing over 90 minutes of cardio or over 90 minutes of strength or over 90 minutes of knitting, whatever; over the long haul, if you develop each area well enough on its own, i think you can be mega-fit in several categories.

Yup - a further refinement of my little picture that I thought of today would be

              Endurance
                /   \
               /     \
              / -----\
             / \  .  /\
            /   \   /   \
       &nb sp;   /     \ /     \   
    strength----speed

 - well, somthing to that effect; most physical qualities are at least slightly fractal in nature so you have that triangle-thingy (or circle if you go by exrx.net's expanded conceptualization of fitness components) repeated ad nauseam on a smaller and smaller scale. Most athletes are over in one of the corners and trying to maximally develop the combination of strength, speed and endurance that their particular sport demands.

 Most people aren't competitive athletes and are better off not adopting the training regimes from one of the corners, but to find something a bit more balanced, at least from a health perspective.

 Dave Tate likens it to a (warning, gruesome picture of actual war wound in the middle of the article, don't click if you are likely to experience a reaction)  stereo equalizer in his version (point 9) - you can actually kinda tune a lot of the components individually to make a whole that functions well for any given sport - but if you try to push everything up to max all you'll get is busted signal.

 Anyway - performance may be maximized over in one of the corners. But health-wise, you're better off with a bit of balance.

I am pretty sure that you have to really over do it to actually burn muscle

 Yes, but it's very easy to really overdo it, all you need to do is have a calorie deficit that exceed your body's capacity for mobilizing energy from fat stores. It's why you have to really pay attention to your nutrition if you want to see good results.

Though, that would also imply that the more fat stores you have, the harder it is to overdo it.

Also, doesn't the AMA recommend something like 30 minutes of cardio, 5 times a week? Or is "cardio" not cardio? Or is it the strength training exception?

I think I'm more confused now than ever on cardio & strength.  I'm trying to do several things at once which I thought were pretty much on the same path:

(1) Get to my goal weight (lose 44 lbs).  (2) Maximize fat loss. (3) Increase strength and endurance.

So I have been doing mostly cardio to create the deficit and increase the endurance.  For example, yesteday I did a nice long ride at about 82% of my MHR for about 80 minutes (15 miles @ 14.5 mph).  Some cardio days are just walking at 65 - 70% of max for about an hour.  So I break the 90 minute rule in just 2 days!  On non cardio days I do some weights like 3 sets of pushups, squats, barbell stuff with the arms & chest, etc.   Trying to get to muscle failure btw 8 - 12 reps.

I'm pretty sure I can limit my walks/jogs/bike to 30 minutes.  However, that would reduce my calorie deficit by 1600 - 1800 per week.  How would I make up the difference?  I'm not even sure I have enough muscle mass in my body to generate the needed burn.

I'm willing to offer myself up as an experiment to science if someone would like to put the opposing views to a test.  Melkor? Tom?

dougdebug, since you are not a competitive bodybuilder whose only goal is gaining the maximum amount of muscle mass in the shortest amount of time there is no 90-minute rule. 

Doug, you don't need to limit, given your goals.

The weight lifting you are already doing will enable you to keep from losing muscle while you lose fat.   The cardio helps with your endurance goals and deficit. You're doing fine.

The 90 minute rule is only about optimizing muscle gain, and that is off the table for you because with a calorie deficit you aren't going to be gaining muscle mass.

A few things you could tweak. Add an interval session per week to your cardio. That will help you increase speed, if you care, and will help burn fat.  

If you want to absolutely optimize fat loss, you might choose to cut back on endurance and add more intensity/weights. But that would suboptimize your endurance. Personally I've was satisfied with 30 lbs of weight loss while building up to going for wonderful long hilly bike rides, so it's all about the goal.

Yup, the 90 minute rule is only applicable if you're going for "maximum muscle gain".

 That ain't on your personal goal list, so anything related to optimizing your training around that particular goal is utterly irrelevant to your situation.

 To maximize fat loss, do about 3 hours of strength training a week, and then as much cardio at all intensities as you have the time and inclination for. 3 hours of strength training is the useful limit to encourage muscle retention and maximum fat loss, and more than that does not improve your results over and above what the equivalent intense cardio can do for you because then you're doing more than what your body can recover from before the next session and you're limiting your results by limiting training intensity.

 As long as you are challenging your body in a variety of ways you're mostly bouncing around in the middle of that conceptual triangle which may not be ideal for getting to the Olympics or taking the Tour, but is decidedly healthier than what a professional athlete dedicated to maximizing performance in any one area gets up to.

 The AMA's 30-minute recommendation encompasses activity of any kind, and their suggest 5-days-a-week activity is 'walk at least 30 minutes 5 days a week".

 On the scale of effort we're discussing here it doesn't even register - it leads to a statistically significant improvement in several biomarkers related to cardio health and function, but Tom won't increase his hill-climbing power and I won't pull any more weight from the floor if we limit ourselves to the bare minimum the AMA suggests. The carryover between "a walk around the parking lot" and "climbing hills on your road bike" is rather limited as far as I can tell, but as far as the AMA's concerned, the "walk around the parking lot" is enough, and any activity which isn't "sitting on the couch watching TV" counts. Even if both Tom and me would classify it as "barely a really light recovery day".

 And yes - S.S. Alpert* had a surprisingly precise calcualtion of the theoretical maximum calorie deficit for dieters, at 31kcal/lbs fat mass/day, so if you have an accurate measurement of your fat mass, your activity level and your calorie intake you can maximise fat loss by redlining your fat metabolism.

 The trouble is with the "accurate" qualification - how sure are you really of your intake, expenditure, and how much fat mass you have available? So I don't recommend that anyone try to push things to that edge either - given the inherent uncertainities of the equation you're better off using a ballpark guesstimate and staying below that.

*S.S. Alpert Journal of Theoretical Biology Volume 233, Issue 1, 7 March 2005, Pages 1-13

Original Post by melkor:

 To maximize fat loss, do about 3 hours of strength training a week, and then as much cardio at all intensities as you have the time and inclination for. 3 hours of strength training is the useful limit to encourage muscle retention and maximum fat loss, and more than that does not improve your results over and above what the equivalent intense cardio can do for you because then you're doing more than what your body can recover from before the next session and you're limiting your results by limiting training intensity.

Does that 3 hour per week break down to about 3 times per week?  Twice per week at 1.5?  Does that time include the 'rest' between sets?  I'm not sure that I could get to an hour of weights doing just the core muscle groups.  Squats, pushups, and barbells take me about 20 to 30 minutes on the days I do weights.  I'm just starting on the weight training and take it slowly since I have lost so much muscle mass in the last 15 years.   Do you have a link to a routine for core muscle groups that you recommend?

I think I have the cardio plan down so at least that done for now.   Keeping the calories at 2000 is not that hard so I'm good there as well. 

 You usually stick to 3-4x weekly because if you can get it done in less, it's better - the point isn't to spend the maximum possible time in the gym, the point is to do what you need to reach your personal fitness goals.

 And you count rest time and everything - training time is from the first time you pick up the weight until you finish your last set. You're better off keeping each session down to 45-60 minutes anyway because after about 60 minutes your serum free testosterone and hGH nosedives while cortisol skyrockets, so you actually start undoing the training effect from what you've already done if you push much past the hour mark. This only applies to strength training, as Tom will tell you, an hour of cardio can be just a warmup for your endurance training. And olympic weight lifters get around that hour-limit by training several times a day and avoiding the exxentric portion of the lift - there's lots of ways to work with what your body's limitations are and have results that are useful for your personal goal, neh?

 My preferred basic barbell training resource is Mark Rippetoes' Starting Strength or Sean10mm's "stripped" 5x5 routine - they're both pretty solid beginner routines. I lean a little more to the Rippeote side of things after reading the actual Starting Strength book but it's more a matter of preference than effectiveness.

 Oh, check out Exrx.net - demonstrations of pretty much all of the common ways to train specific muscles. And their instructions for developing your own workout helps immensely when writing your own programs, to make sure you haven't left anything out. Though they are a litte over on the HIT side of the spectrum with their training instructions and I'm not convinced that HIT is a very useful training modality for most people.

 In any case, the 3-hour line is more a "more than 3 hours is probably a waste of your time" than a "you must do at least 3 hours" - if your training program allows you do hit your training goals in less time, more power to you.

Melkor:

Thanks for the links and info.  I'll read through them after work and pick one that fits.