Weight lifting in Apollo Beach, FL.Cardio will not make you muscular and it will not make you lean, which is the combination of low body fat and noticeable muscularity. It can, on the other hand, make you look like an anorexic or make you look flabby and soft, if you do enough of it or do nothing but.

Now, I made a gross generalization just now in saying that cardio will not make you lean. Let me explain further. Cardio will not make you lean if a) you do it at a medium pace, as in jogging or aerobics, or b) you do way too much of it without also doing weight-lifting to somewhat off-set the muscle loss.

I’ll explain “a” first. The problem with medium pace cardio is that it burns muscle. I’ll use running as the prime example of medium-pace cardio. Running burns fat and muscle indiscriminately because you’re body wants to become as efficient as possible at traveling long distances at a medium pace, and the way for it to do so is to weigh less, and since muscle weighs more than fat, the quickest way to weigh less is to burn muscle off.

That’s not a good thing if your goal is to have a good-looking physique. What that’s going to do is make you look soft, or, if you do it to an extreme extent, make you look gaunt. Average people, and by that I mean non-athletes, just don’t have any muscle to spare, so losing it little by little over time can not only be unhealthy, it can also make your physique look unimpressive. That is why I don’t recommend running to my clients.

Now, on to “b”, if you do way too much cardio you will be risking your joints as well as your appearance. I'll use the actor Matthew McConaughey as an example because he provides a good example of why some people do well with running. If you don’t know how he trains, I’ll quickly explain it to you: He runs . . . a lot. He also lifts weights . . . every day. He also eats a high protein diet and has extraordinary genetics.

Good for him. But that doesn’t mean his workout will work for everyone, and it certainly doesn’t mean running will make you look like him. He trains 2 or 3 hours a day, you got that kind of time? I’m going to assume you don’t and that you care about your knees and hip sockets. Oh and don’t forget - doing too much cardio will burn off muscle!

Free weights are king. It’s a simple concept, the body was made to move freely in all 3 dimensions and free weights allow you to do this. On the other hand, weightlifting machines (those things that have padded seats, fixed ranges of motion and weight stacks) lock you into one position and force you to follow one path up and down. Now, the problem with machines is two-fold; you’re not working your stabilizer muscles and you’re not getting the functional aspect you’d get from lifting free weights, thus, you’re not getting stronger!

First off, you’re not activating your core or any of the many other stabilizer muscles in your body on most machines. Your body is comfortably supported in the exact position you need to be in, and except for the muscle you’re using, the rest of your body is just sitting relaxed, just like in real life right? No, I'm afraid that's not so. The body works as one and you should treat it as such in the gym or you will teach your body to not work as one outside of the gym, which could eventually lead to problems.

Stabilizer muscles serve to keep you safe when you’re not in a fixed position being supported by padded surfaces, which I assume is pretty often.  The most important stabilizer muscles are your abdominals and obliques, which form what is referred to as the “core”. Having a strong core can make you look really good in a bathing suit (if you’re lean enough), and it can also serve to keep your spine from buckling! There are also stabilizer muscles in your shoulders; they help you swing a hammer precisely, close a car door, or any kind of physical effort you can think of where your shoulder joint moves, and also in your thighs, which help keep you balanced when you walk, jump, squat down, run away from an angry badger, or any other kind of activity you do on or off your feet.

Secondly, you’re not getting any of the functional benefits associated with lifting free weights because machines don’t mimic real life, and thus, any muscle gains using machines will not translate to real-world strength. Free weights, on the other hand, do mimic real life, and if you get stronger at lifting heavy free weights in the gym, you get stronger at lifting any objects outside of the gym.

Free weights also tend to lead to chronic joint health. Usually seeing the word “chronic” isn’t good, but here it’s not only good, it’s something we should all strive for; chronically healthy joints! This comes from the strengthening of those stabilizer muscles that keep everything in place and come into play whenever you do anything physical. Free weights strengthen muscles, which include their stabilizers, and strong muscles keep joints safe when they need support, which is pretty much all the time, unless you’re asleep…on a waterbed.

Arnold Schwarzenegger built his initial size with 5 free-weight movements; the power clean, the military press, the squat, the bench press, and the deadlift. You don’t need to know what these movements are, just that they involve a barbell, lots of weight plates and no padded armrests. The Big 5, as they’re sometimes referred to, are how all the old-time bodybuilders gained their initial size. Arnold was perhaps the most famous practitioner of this system, but many weightlifters of the ‘Golden Era’ followed a similar program, this was the original Muscle Beach workout. Bodybuilders built their impressive physiques by lifting heavy free weights.