“Endurance” is a form of “cardio” but not all cardio is endurance.
That out of the way - rucking at a steady pace for a prolonged period of time, say heart rate zone 2, 60 to 70% HRMax, able to have a conversation, is mostly endurance cardio with some muscle strength elements, mostly core.
@Al128 , you may just be getting a little “orthostatic” - IOW exactly right. Your big leg muscles may have reduced resistance during your level 2 rowing session, stand up quickly and the blood pools lower and your heart has to beat faster to keep enough blood flowing to your head. Your might even feel a little dizzy (if so sit right back down) until your body responds by sending messages to constrict the blood vessels so there is enough pressure to keep blood flowing well to brain.
That’s my WAG anyway.
Returning to this - yes deconditioning from cardio can happen quickly, much more quickly than strength deconditioning, but if well adapted recovery can happen quickly as well. Plus total volume can be significantly reduced with conditioning maintained if some frequency of intensity is kept up.
In general populations, endurance performance can be maintained for up to 15 weeks when training frequency is reduced to as little as 2 sessions per week or when exercise volume is reduced by 33–66% (as low as 13–26 minutes per session), as long as exercise intensity (exercising heart rate) is maintained. Strength and muscle size (at least in younger populations) can be maintained for up to 32 weeks with as little as 1 session of strength training per week and 1 set per exercise, as long as exercise intensity (relative load) is maintained; whereas, in older populations, maintaining muscle size may require up to 2 sessions per week and 2–3 sets per exercise, while maintaining exercise intensity. Insufficient data exists to make specific recommendations for athletes or military personnel. Our primary conclusion is that exercise intensity seems to be the key variable for maintaining physical performance over time, despite relatively large reductions in exercise frequency and volume.
The HR response to ergometer rowing (sitting and using both arms and legs) was compared to treadmill running (upright exercise involving mainly the legs) using a progressive exercise intensity protocol in 55 healthy men [mean (SD) height 176 (5) cm, body mass 71 (6) kg, age 21 (3) years]. During rowing HR was lower than during running at a blood lactate concentration of 2 mmol.l(-1) [145 (13) compared to 150 (11) beat.min(-1), P<0.05], 4 mmol.l(-1) [170 (10) compared to 177 (13) beat.min(-1), P<0.05], and 6 mmol.l(-1) [182 (10) compared to 188 (10) beat.min(-1), P<0.05]. Also during maximal intensity rowing, HR was lower than during maximal intensity running [194 (9) compared to 198 (11) beat.min(-1), P<0.05]. These results were accompanied by a higher maximal oxygen uptake during rowing than during running [rowing compared to running, 4.50 (0.5) and 4.35 (0.4) l.min(-1), respectively, P<0.01]. Thus, the oxygen pulse, as an index of the stroke volume of the heart, was higher during rowing than during running at any given intensity. The results suggest that compared to running, the seated position and/or the involvement of more muscles during rowing facilitate venous return and elicit a smaller HR response for the same relative exercise intensity.
Some may also be that the position limits diaphragmatic movements.
It is true the heart has to work slightly harder to overcome gravity. In the absence of symptoms, a heart rate below 85% of (220 minus your age) is not concerning and means it is working hard but probably not excessively. This old guideline is imperfect.
While I agree with @DSeid about cardiac changes, there is much overlap. A muscle only knows how to contract, whether it is running or deadlifting. Supplying oxygen to working muscles and removing wastes (including CO2 and lactate) necessarily mean you have to raise pressure or the volume pumped (mainly by raising the heart rate, but over long periods by changing the structure of the heart to increase stroke volume. The number and nature of mitochondria and oxygen carrying red blood cells also changes).
But while an individual muscle fiber, even an individual motor unit (the fundamental functional unit of a skeletal muscle: a single motor neuron and the population of muscle fibers it innervates) only “know” to contract or not, a complete muscle typically consists of multiple motor units, of different twitch types, and the muscle does know to fire different motor units for different demands such as running vs deadlifting, the body does learn to fire those motor units in that complete muscle in different patterns as part of neuromuscular adaptations, and different populations of motor units within that single complete muscle fire or do not fire, change over time in different ways, contingent on the task.
Cardiac muscle and its interaction with the nervous system also adapts. It is is not organized as motor units like skeletal muscle (instead it’s a “functional syncytium” with cells all attached by gap junctions and the automatic nervous system doing the direct nervous system control part). But it also learns to respond differently over time to different demands at different levels.
To be concise: a complete muscle knows more than only how to contract, yes or no.
The muscle does not independently decide how many fibres to contract, but relies on the nervous system. I oversimplified, sorry, but you did as well so have little basis for criticism. Deadlifting lasts seconds and is largely anaerobic, which leads to the development of new arterioles and mitochondria in addition to slow heart remodelling.
I did find this paper on heart remodelling in endurance athletes interesting, and you are right about stroke volumes increasing and many other things.
I’ll try to not get into an exercise physiology need slap fight … but of course not “decide”, let alone “independently”, (I certainly never claimed or implied either), and yes it is the motor units, which includes the spinal motor neurons, powered by messages from the brain, that control which populations of fibers in each muscle fire when.
Can you provide me some material on that? I have previously understood that it was aerobicexercise that effectively leads to the development of new arterioles and mitochondria, and that brief anaerobic bursts were relatively less of a trigger for either - which makes sense to me since anaerobic bursts are … anaerobic … not using the respiration energy cycles of mitochondria. If my understanding is wrong I’d love to have some material explaining it.
If correct, then yes, those different adaptations are a huge part of why pure strength training, even when it is keeping heart rate up there, doesn’t effectively lead to cardio gains.
To re emphasize - there is overlap.
Oh! Thank you for the article link! Yes interesting!
Adding … agreement on the importance of the nervous system in “deciding” what happens in the muscles with extension to the heart:
Stroke volume increase in endurance adapted athletes allows for resting bradycardia but the “order” to run at that low rate come from a strong parasympathetic system, high baseline vagal tone, and relatively less baseline sympathetic tone, the heart’s nervous system control, the autonomic nervous system telling it what to do.
The seminal work by Hudlicka demonstrated that capillary density changes in skeletal muscle in response to electrical stimulation can result from a variety of factors (Hudlicka and Tyler 1984; Hudlicka et al. 1987) including increased blood flow to the muscle causing a mechanical stimulus (shear stress) to the vascular wall (Hudlicka 1991), passive stretch of the tissue induced by muscle contraction (Egginton et al. 2001; Kissane et al. 2021), and metabolism and hypoxia, all of which result in downstream signalling promoting angiogenesis. Such biochemical factors reported to be potential contributors to the exercise-induced growth of new blood vessels include lactate (Morland et al. 2017) and activation of the hypoxia inducible factor-1α (HIF-1α) pathway (Breen et al. 2008; Fiorenza et al. 2020). However, over the past 60 years, research has discovered many more contributors…
As for mitochondria, both strength and endurance training seem to aid in increasing number and function in different ways. Strength training using the mTOR pathway.
All this stuff may seem opaque. So let’s get back to news you can use. Is there away to do a weightlifting set that harnesses recent scientific knowledge to speed up muscle growth? The good news is yes, and these sets are so effective (and difficult) you do not need to do many sets.
[Summary, remember “5-5-10-15”:
5 reps with 5 second negative, 5 regular reps, 1 rep 10 second negative, 1 hold for 15-30+ seconds. The article below discusses the science behind this scheme.]
Thank you for the links. I fear however there is a bit of trees obscuring forest. The first article is full of interesting mechanisms of how exercise impacts mitochondria, with most of the reviewed studies focused using aerobic exercise. Which isn’t to say that there are no impacts of strength training on mitochondrial function; there definitely is. But aerobic is the big driver, especially in regard to mitochondrial volume and number.
So for example - this one using HIIT as the aerobic arm, compared to resistance and combined training arms:
We assessed the effects of 12 wk of supervised high-intensity interval training (HIIT), resistance training, and combined training (CT) on skeletal muscle mitochondrial abundance and markers of fission and fusion. HIIT increased mitochondrial area and size and promoted protein changes indicative of increased mitochondrial fusion, whereas lessor effects were observed after CT and no changes were observed after RT. Furthermore, increased mitochondrial area and size after HIIT associated with improved mitochondrial respiration, cardiorespiratory fitness, and insulin sensitivity.
Not a final word and I am expecting the finding of your second cite will end up accurate- that doing both rules even here.
Anyway. More other stuff. I’ll find the article later but a fun bit on whether it is better to do the same volume hitting a muscle group as repeats of the same exercise, or as different exercises. And doesn’t really matter for most purposes.
Returning to bring the article but first what triggered my looking for some research on it was aMen’s Health article in my news feed claiming
“spreading work across variations can be more productive than piling on sets of a single lift, he says. 'This means it’s better to do fewer sets of more different exercises, even if working the same muscle, because we’re distributing fatigue across different areas of the muscle.’ …
… use fewer sets per exercise, vary movements that train the same muscle, avoid taking every set to failure, and cap total volume within a session
Now that appeals to my variety is better bias but is it real?
A scientific review. And yes and no and maybe. But overall not much “better” or “worse.”
My WAG is that more variety will result in more real world transferability no matter what the real world task is, but that more focus on the lift you care about will result in more progress on a strength metric defined as lifting more on that lift: specificity. But to me five sets of the same lift is just less fun than fewer sets of a variety of exercises.
Any preferences from participants here? (Pretty I have asked this before years ago.)
Certain exercises definitely offer more bang for the buck and you can only do so much in a given session. Also, goals matter. Bodybuilders often do more exercises to concentrate on perceived aesthetic weak points or get a fuller appearance.
If you want to get strong at bench pressing, should you bench, decline bench, incline bench, close grip bench, press and floor press every session? No. This takes a lot more time and doing one set of each won’t usually supply the same stimulus and needed volume as several sets. The way to deal with fatigue is by resting more between similar workouts. If you enjoy variety and don’t compete, better to do incline one day, straight bench another, decline another. Leave a longer time before you do the same movement. If you do compete, bench more often and do one or two more effective accessory exercises each time you work chest and triceps.
If you curl, you should do (say) just a preacher curl and hammer curl. You can add or substitute standing curls, and once in a while do Zottmann curls, concentration curls, reverse curls, wrist curls, etc. but there is not much benefit to doing more than 2-3 types any session since they tend to be more similar than different.
In general, some variations are far less effective and these should be substituted for more effective ones. There is also some logic to doing machine or cable variations later in a workout because of safety and convenience.
What about for those who aren’t driven by any sense of bodybuilder aesthetics, are not concerned about hitting personal best records in specific lifts, who strength train at most three times a week alternating with aerobic exercise, and whose concerns are healthspan and function across many broad activities? Not interested in specificity, interested in generalizability? Wants to get major muscles hit in all planes including rotational?
I’m thinking total volume of near failure sets that hit the major muscles of question is the most important factor. (Earlier in this thread there was some article grading some exercises count as full vs half but I’d to look and lazy now.) However you happen to get there.
So X number of full upper body pull, X of upper body push, same push pull mix big lower body, all to near failure. Can be a small variety of exercises to do that or more but still hit X of near failure. Mix up ring dips/pull ups with bench and bent over rows to get to X should be fine; do all ring dips/pull ups fine too.
Those are reasonable goals; many want to have functional strength when old to maintain healthspan. Some ways of reaching these goals are much more time and energy efficient than others, but there are many ways to make pasta.
The idea is to lift heavy to maintain strength and to also do explosive movements to maintain power, avoid injury, enjoy what you are doing, consider balance and flexibility and joint health, boost endurance and VO2 max, and do training which is functional for one’s purposes.
The big lifts are popular since they work many muscles with substantial weights. This is time efficient. Doing just the big lifts will eventually result in joint imbalances - you need to row to keep the shoulders healthy if you do heavy presses. So push and pull mixes balance things better.
Overhead work is also important to maintain shoulder flexibility and function. But some lifts are better for muscle development than the big lifts - weighted dips work the chest and triceps more effectively; pull-ups work the biceps better than curls; loaded carries are more functional than a quick lift, strength-endurance means being able to do moderate loads at higher volume and is best for building muscle mass to reduce the burdens of sarcopenia while allowing for better recovery than always working to failure and reducing the risk of injury (don’t test your one-rep max very often).
It is good to exercise almost every day. A lot of this exercise should ideally be walking a dog. Walking is great for the back and joints. Doing more strenuous cardio 1-3 times a week would help too. But a caution. Past a certain age it is much better to strength train every other day, or somewhat less. You need the recovery time to be able to do the next workout with decent intensity. And a hard cardio workout should be treated the same as a strength workout in this regard. Alternate strength and cardio. But throw in walking, maybe a team or racquet sport, maybe the occasional yoga class for balance and fiexibility if you do not have chronic pain. Don’t do any exercise that exacerbates pain.
More is better. One set is dramatically better than none, and may be plenty depending on your goal. One set may even be enough for serious strength training if you do them with the 5-5-10-15+ template I linked to maybe ten posts ago?
Not actually looking for the advice; by this point I am comfortable doing what I do! The point is to give a specific context that may apply to a large number of us: healthspan and function focus (not primarily vanity or strength numbers as accomplishments for their own sake) and only going to spend so much time resistance training.
My specific just to illustrate: I typically exercise average 45 to 60 minutes a day six days a week. Not rigid. Split typically 3 days full body strength and 3 days aerobic. Good weather will include more time spent with cycling and longer runs in the mix, but use the baseline as above.
Your post strongly cautions against the risk of developing imbalances. So let’s give two choices in the same chunk of time in the resistance training day. All exercises done to near failure.
Six sets of bench alternating with dumbbell rows.
Three sets of ring dips alternating with ring pull ups and two sets of the above.
Same volume of sets. Same prime mover muscles. Same hitting to near failure.
I’d prefer option two but I am not convinced it is “better” per se. Probably equal for hypertrophy/preventing sarcopenia. Probably less good for putting up max bench or row numbers. Probably better for generalizable strength. Mostly I just enjoy option two more myself.
Note neither would be a complete work out.
FWIW here is the article again about volume, “prime mover” and synergistic muscles with full or fractional sets added up using those arbitrary classifications:
