Struggling to Progress towards Cardio Guidelines

Training Q&A [Moderated]
1

Hello BBM folks,

I’ve been a late novice / early intermediate lifter in his early 30s doing an upper lower program hypertrophy program. I weigh 160lbs and currently leaning on the skinny fat side at the moment.

Right now my only form of activity is lifting and averaging more than 10k steps a day. Building muscle is my primary goal but health is also very important to me so I’ve been trying to add in more cardio with the goal to hit the recommended guidelines by the American Heart Association and Barbell Medicine, with a long term goal of progressing pass that over the next few years.

However, every time I try to add cardio, even if I feel like the amount is small enough or the rate of intensity increase is small enough to not cause issues, I always find myself aggravating something on the body, whether it be my low back, or knees, or my ankles. Usually I start off with something and then after 4-8 weeks something gets bothered. If I do a bike then at some point my knees get bothered. If it’s the incline treadmill at some point it’s my ankle. If it’s the stairmaster at some point it’s my knees. If it’s running at some point it’s my ankle. You get the picture.

Every time this happens I get frustrated and I give up, feeling like I’ve never hit my cardio goal, and worry over the long term health outcomes from not doing cardio.

In the past I’ve tried other progression models as well such as:
Starting off with 5 minutes post every lifting session (so 4 sessions) and then adding 2.5 minutes every session and/or increasing intensity, but eventually hitting some recovery issues around some joint depending on the machine and usually the time I get to the 20 minute / session (80 minutes total) mark.

My guess is that it’s a loading issue but I’ve tried all these different methods of loading in the cardio and I keep spinning my wheels. Maybe I’m adding too much resistance on these machines, but I want to hit that Z1 HR (which in my case would be 140 - 165 BPM).

I was thinking about signing up for a consult but I was wondering if maybe it would be better to start off with some BBM template that would work to get my conditioning up to 150 minutes / week and allow me to progress to higher levels in the next couple years.

Thank you!

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Rybell (excellent username),

Thanks for the post. I do agree that you should be targeting 150 min/wk of conditioning at an intensity that’s higher than 10k steps/day. I should add that I think 10k steps per day is fine, as it probably adds ~ 30-40 min of activity/day for most adults. Still, the intensity is not really high enough to drive improvements in cardiorespiratory fitness for most. If I got to pick, I’d advocate for 8k steps per day AND 150 min/wk of formal conditioning, performed at a HR between ~60-80% of max. I’d favor cycling, elliptical, the rower, ski erg, and/or stairs over running for conditioning modes. To that point, your zone 1 heart rate using the 5-zone model is 113 to 136 BPM. We have a calculator for it here:

I don’t know the details of your program, though I do have concerns about its appropriateness given the injury/recovery stuff you mention. I’d consider our 3-day Bodybuilding II template given your goals and training history.

-Jordan

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Jordan,

Thank you so much for the response. I have purchased BBII per your suggestion and intend on running that progression model for my cardio. Hope to make some good progress towards my goals in the next few months.

As a follow up regarding adaptations / pain. When I started on this cardio journey a few weeks ago, I started with the elliptical (I did 1 minute at level 10 and 4 minutes at level 6, interval style, for a total of 25 minutes). First time doing it, my ankle was really sore for a few days afterwards. I tried elliptical again yesterday (level 8 for 20 minutes), my ankle is sore but not as bad as last time. Do you think the elliptical is something my body will adapt to over time, assuming I stick with the same intensity the next week, or do you think it would be better to stick to an alternative cardio machine going forward?

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I suspect your body will adapt and the elliptical is relatively low impact, which would be one of my strategies when starting.