7 Reasons You’re Not Building Muscle

#3 You are doing way too much cardio

One of the most common hopes from building muscle is the inevitable fat loss that will follow. You want immediate results, you want to look leaner and you want a great physique. Cardio is your ticket to looking great, but doing too much of it will derail the muscle growth you’re trying so hard to promote. 

The lesson:

Steady cardio for more than an hour on the treadmill or Stairmaster can be damaging your body for muscle growth. To build muscle efficiently, your muscles have to be taxed and those fast twitch fibers will need to be firing at a high level. This does not happen during a typical cardio session. Instead, you should aim to do metabolic style training where you do your muscle building moves with minimal rest periods between each set. If you still need to do your cardio, you should try interval training with bodyweight exercises or one of the cardio machines. Remember: Don’t do it for more than 20 minutes. If you are doing cardio for more than 20 minutes, you are sabotaging your muscle growth.

Final thought:

With so many options to get cardio rewards without doing steady state cardio, it’s beyond me why you would want to spend hours on a boring elliptical. Personally, I’d rather hit the weights hard in the gym with little rest and also enjoy sports training.