Freak Fitness

As the contest season quickly approaches, I get asked a lot about how much cardio I prescribe to my clients for competition preparation. My simple answer is “I don’t know.” I say this because I can’t give a specific answer to a general question like that without going into greater detail about all of the factors considered when preparing someone for a show. I’m taking this opportunity to provide further insight into my cardio prescription methods.

Before I get into it, I want to know when the hell “cardio” became such a bad word. Granted, we’ve all heard horror stories of athletes having to do two 90-minute sessions each day while on 700-calorie diets. Combined with fat burner and thyroid medication abuse, you can quickly see how this can become a nightmare! And yes, in those cases, “cardio” is a bad word, but every element in that scenario is bad!

With those extreme examples aside, if our ancestors had never run after the herds of animals they were hunting, our early relatives would have surely perished. They didn’t have cars or buses to go to grocery stores to get food; they had to be continuously moving to keep up and survive. Humans are animals and we’re designed to move, not sit on our asses in front of computers all day. Serve your natural purpose and give your body what it needs—motion!
With that out of the way, I base my cardio prescriptions on various factors for the specific athlete, including but not limited to:

• Athletic background – what sports they have played, training age, past/current injuries
• Current activities – how much cardio they’re doing now, what type of work they do (physical or sedentary), amount of day-to-day stress, current diet/training/supplement regimen
• Current health status – what athletic condition they’re in right now, what their general body composition is
• Goals – how many weeks out their show is, what the level of competition is, what discipline they have
Knowing there are a large number of things to consider, I hope you can appreciate how each client is unique and why I can never predict how much cardio a specific athlete will have to do to get ready for his or her show. I’ve had an overall women’s physique champion win her show without doing any cardio, while I myself had to peak at one 60-minute session and one 45-minute session every day for the last six weeks of my last show preparation. (In case you were wondering, I won the overall too!)

The question remains: How much cardio is too much? Generally speaking, I’ve never prescribed more than two 60-minute sessions daily for longer than four weeks, but in those two cases, two major factors had to be identified. Both were advanced athletes, so they needed a very strong stimulus to achieve further progress, and neither were doing any weighted leg exercises because their legs could gain muscle from simply walking by a squat rack! So we combined lower body plyometrics and their cardio work to achieve the training effect we wanted. (You guessed it, they also won!)
In the end, my overall methodology is this: I train all of my clients like athletes. I expect a lot and make them work very hard, but I feed them very well, and the physiques they present onstage speak for themselves. Almost all of my clients do cardio, but each does the amount and intensity of cardio he or she needs to progress, and no more. Cardio does a body good!

For an continuation about the cardio conundrum, and 'what kind is the right kind' questions, check out this article on HIIT vs LISS!