 Cardio is terrible for fat loss. Watch this. Our next caller is Ron from Florida. Ron, what's happening, man? How can we help you? Hey, what's up guys? I'm happy to be here. It's, uh, it's truly an honor. You guys provide amazing content. Thanks, brother. Thanks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so just a little background. I'll jump right into my questionnaire. Uh, 29 been lifting for about 10 years or so. Uh, I put on a decent amount of muscle what I consider. Um, and now I mean, I've run anabolic twice. I ran, uh, anabolic advanced, which was amazing. Uh, and I'm running inabolic for the second time now. And I'm just curious at what point should, if you're trying to cut, so I'm at about 14% body fat would like to get down to 10%. You know, at what point should you introduce cardio? How much should you do? You know, are you, should you do more hit training or steady state cardio? Um, kind of my question revolves around, I understand y'all's, uh, um, the, I guess I understand the muscle building burning metabolism or burning fat, you know, high metabolism, more muscle you have. I understand that. But at what point do you start to cut and kind of, you know, start to bring your calories down? If you look at never do cardio to cut. Now that doesn't mean don't do cardio, do cardio for the health benefits. But if you want to cut that comes from diet, people who use cardio to cut are, are not using it, uh, are not, it's not effective. Even people who compete on stage, ideally you use it at the very end because your calories are already so low and you're so depleted and you're just trying to squeeze off just a bit more body fat. But where's your calorie intake right now? It's about 2,500. Okay. And you're 167. Is that right? Uh, yeah. You have any idea how many steps you take a day? I just, I just got a fitness track or maybe about a couple of weeks ago. It's sitting right around 8,000 steps on average. Okay. So this is how I decide if I'm going to introduce cardio. First of all, I want to do most of my leaning out and cutting through, through diet first, so cutting back on calories. And then for me, like my, my numbers, I never get lower than about 22, 2300 calories. Now I'm a bigger guy. So that's my number. So maybe yours is more like 1,900 or 2,000. I never want to go much lower than that. I just don't want to be eating that low. Plus I needed a certain amount of nutrients to maintain the muscle mass in my body. So I had, that's kind of my, my number. I don't want to go lower than that. Then I look at my steps and I go, okay, if I'm taking 8,000 steps right now, and I want to continue leaning out next week, my goal is that every single day I'm going to hit 10,000 steps. And then the next week after that, I'm like, okay, every day I'm going to hit 12,000 steps through walking, just activity throughout the day. Then it comes to a point when I, and for me, it's around 16,000 or so, where it's really hard for me to just add walks in the day to get 16,000 steps. So now I, I actively pursue, you know, at a half hour or 45 minutes on the treadmill in addition to my activity. And it's low, low, you know, uh, list cardio. So low intensity, not going hard at all. Just really again, paying attention to steps. I'm trying to hit that 16,000 steps. And so that's how I introduce cardio. It's much easier to reverse out of that once I hit my lean point that I want to be at. So I'm not forced with this hour of intense cardio twice a day, like some of these competitors do. So it's a much better strategy because unless you want to do cardio continually, what will happen is if you do it to get down to your 10% and then you're like, cool, I'm at 10% and then you completely cut out, cut it out. You're going to put all the weight right back on. Yeah, but Adam, I want to ask you this because you did cardio when you competed, right? And you've already gotten down to at that point, you know, 4% body fat or 3% body fat. So, you know, Ron, you're at 14% body fat. I mean, unless you want to get on stage and you're getting down to the low singles or, you know, mid-single digit body fat percentage. I don't think cardio, cardio is not a great way to lean out. It's just a, it's a healthy way to exercise. One of the side effects is sometimes you get leaner, but your best bet is to do this with diet and strength training. That's what's going to get you lean in the most sustainable, most effective way possible. You could also, so you went anabolic, you went anabolic advanced. Now you're back anabolic and I'd put you on performance. You do a pro, a program like that. That's more novel. You also have a phase in there where you have endurance. So you're definitely going to burn more calories. Yeah. You're doing different exercises. You're not, that aren't traditional. So all that stimulus is going to end up utilizing more energy, which is going to result in you leaning out. So that's also a great strategy. So cutting your calories a little bit more, following a different program, focusing on steps. You may never have to even do cardio and easily get down from 14 to 10%. Okay. So all right. Well, that was going to be my next question then. So at what point, so if you want to get into the low single digits or even, even say high single digits at that point, you need to introduce cardio, you know, you don't necessarily ever need to, you could get down. So, okay, you, you're carrying yourself at 14%. When I was off, when I was not in prep, I was off season, right? So when I was in my phase of putting size on, I actually maintained around 10% body fat, maybe 11 at the highest when I was competing. And then I would prep for a show. Show prep would only be about six to eight weeks for me because I kept myself in that nine to 10% range. And I could drop about a percent every single week just through reducing calories and increasing my steps throughout my day. And then maybe the final two weeks or so when I'm assessing my body and I'm getting ready to be on stage in two weeks, I would use cardio because I realized like, oh, I need to get a little bit leaner before. I mean, but I mean, I would get all the way down to six, sub six percent, which is, you know, stage physiques for a lot of people without even doing any cardio, just by walking and diet. And then your cardio was, was, was what? Was it just more walking or running or? Yeah, yeah, mostly walking. I never had to do intense cardio. There was no, no point. I would never want to push my body with intense cardio in a calorie deficit because it sends a signal to the body to pare down muscle. If you're doing intensive cardio while also in a calorie deficit, holding on to muscle is almost impossible. Yeah, what happened? And I'm on, and I'm on an anabolic steroids. It's still, your body is going to, your body is getting the signal that, oh, I'm feeding it less and it's asking me to do endurance. We don't need a lot of muscle. So all I would do is walk. You'd be an inclined walk at the highest bit of intensity if I'm doing any sort of like formal cardio. The rest was just done in steps. What happens to a lot of people is they'll do the cardio. They'll see the scale weight go down. Yeah. But their body fat percentage does not go down because they've lost muscle along with body fat. So if you just want to lose, you know, go down in size, then I would say that's fine. But if you're trying to get lean and maintain muscle, I mean, again, I'm going to just go back to what I said earlier. Cardio is a great way to build stamina, endurance. It can be very healthy just to increase activity. I'm not anti-cardio. It's just people who use it for the, for something that it's not great at. Like, oh, I just want to get lean. It's not a great way to get lean. Great way to get lean is strength train and diet. That's the way that you get lean. And the only reason why competitors use cardio is because they exhaust all methods. You're looking at a very extreme situation where every calorie is counted. Every drop of water is counted. Their volume is equated. They're just like at the very end. But I mean, the average person, no. Now I think they should do cardio for health. I think it's good for you, but you're talking about just getting leaner. In which case I'd say no, don't do, don't do any, don't worry about it. Yeah, you just got to, you just got to keep in mind what the signal you're sending the body by doing cardio while also cutting calories. Uh, I mean, you want to know a real, real quick way to lose muscle. That's the fastest is that's, that's the recipe right there. High intensity cardio for a long duration in addition to low calories is the fastest way to reduce muscle mass. And so I'm trying my best to manipulate my program, reduce calories and, uh, create more movement, like walking throughout the day as much as I can before ever having to use cardio. And if I can do it without ever doing that, I won't. And now the only reason why it, when you get down to like four or five percent, that's what it gets great. It gets really difficult to shred every last bit of body fat on you. So that extra push on cardio kind of makes sense. But unless you're getting on stage, you could get down to six percent body fat and never do formal cardio at all. Okay. All right. Yeah. Yeah. Cause I, I've, I've ran, like I said, that program. I've seen tremendous results from it. And you know, I was one of those that just kind of did the bro split, you know, never did legs. And then I started doing your, your programs, phenomenal programs, by the way. Um, so then I just decided, all right, well, two days a week for anabolic, you know, maybe I'll incorporate some running. Just to kind of, I guess amplify the, the, the burn, but that makes sense. I mean, I understand what y'all are saying. I just, I was curious if you could incorporate it into a cut, but, you know, well, could and most optimal are two different things. Could you, yes, is it most optimal? No, not if your goal is to hang on to as much muscle as possible. And let me tell you what the, the people that will try and counter this argument with me that are the science nerds, the biggest benefit to this, this aspect of shredding out or building muscle that cardio makes sense is when you, it hinders your workouts. So if you can't do, you know, say sets of 15 and squats and you're gassed cardiovascularly and your muscles aren't fatigued, then there's huge value in building endurance, building endurance in order to push your body and the weights like that. But if you've got pretty good endurance like that, and you can say, do 20 reps of squats with good weight and stuff like that. And it's your legs that give out before your, your heart gives out on you, meaning you get out of breath type of deal, then you're probably pretty damn good as far as your, your cardiovascular endurance. You, people think that you have to get on this like formal treadmill to, to be doing something that's strengthening their heart. You do some supersets or 20 sets of squats and you're going to build some pretty damn good cardiovascular endurance, you know, and I would challenge anybody that doesn't believe that to go try that and do that. And so, and that's a much better strategy to leaning out while also maintaining muscle is doing 20 sets of 20 reps of squats. You're going to get those benefits, the cardiovascular benefits while also hanging on to more muscle that way versus you taking that same period of time and getting on a treadmill and going for runs. Does that make sense? Yeah, of course. Okay. All right. I just want to say two things. Number one, uh, I listen to other podcasts and this is a shout out to Doug, the, the, uh, the vocals and the, the acoustics in your studio are phenomenal. I, it's hard to listen to another podcast. Second thing, um, there was like an Aussie guy on this show like two weeks ago and he mentioned something about how you guys provide like tremendous content about being fathers and stuff like that. And I just want to second that he, uh, he provided a really nice comment to you guys and yeah, you guys do a really good job. Kind of, you know, explaining fatherhood and, you know, being, you know, almost father figures to everybody else that are not, you know, in this, in this space. So yeah, man, you guys are doing great. Thank you. That's actually one of our favorite comments to hear that. I appreciate that. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks guys. Hey, wait, wait. Did you, do you not have maps performance? Uh, no, I've, no, I'm going to have Doug send that to you because that's, I think that's, that would be a great program for you also. So let's, let's, let's add that to you. All right. Thanks guys. You got it. Appreciate it. That this is where we get the, the, you know, this, this labeling that 100% in the comments, uh, you'll have some, some morons, right? Listen, cardio is good for you. You should do some cardio. It's healthy activities. Good for you. You should do that kind of activity. It's good for you. Yeah. It's, it's a terrible way to get lean. It is not a great strategy to get lean. It's not a fat burning button. What, looking at your diet and doing strength training is a much more effective way of, of losing just pure body fat. That's it. So if you're doing cardio for the sake of trying to lose body fat, that's, I mean, can it, can you use it that way? You can, but it's not a very effective approach. It doesn't work very well and it often results in muscle loss because people of the way they abuse it or utilize it. So that's just it. That's just the bottom line. So the question was, should I do, do I need to do cardio to get lean? No. And it's probably not even the, it's, and it's also not the most effective way.