Hey! Look Who’s Back!

PLEASE tell me it’s another ‘new rules for women’!……I’m in stage 3, so you have a little time …..I love it! Thanks.

Sara, this one’s for men and women. It is awesome.

Doug, sure, more activity is better. Try to do something active every day, even if it’s as low-intensity as mowing your lawn or hitting a bucket of golf balls at the driving range. I’m 53, and I can attest that what you don’t use disappears pretty fast, whether we’re talking about muscle, strength, speed, or hand-eye coordination.

The one caution is when you cross over into activities that require recovery time, and might compromise the results of the NROL workouts. Off the top of my head, I can think of three categories of activities that might interfere:

1. Activities that use the same muscles and energy systems

If you’re rowing, for example, you’re going to induce some fatigue in your upper-body muscles, and that might reduce your strength and muscle endurance the next time you’re in the gym. Basketball might do a number on your leg muscles.

2. Activities that beat up your joints

I could never lift the day after playing basketball. My knees needed at least a couple of days to recover before I could do any serious lower-body training.

3. Activities that leave you drained

If you go for a long run on Sunday, and it’s hot and humid, you might not have anything left in the tank for a workout on Monday.

You have to use your own judgment. At 57, you know your own body better than anyone else possibly could. But if you’ve been inactive for a while, you might not have a good sense of how it long it takes to recover from one thing before you can do something else with full effort.

I have been reading your latest book and have a question about the part cardio plays in working out. Will doing cardio workouts on the off days undermine building muscle.
I am a beginner, so weightloss is important to me but I don’t want
to loss what muscle I’ve got.I’m not overweight but do have those area
that have been resistant to loss, especially my belly. Thanks

Vicki, as I explained to Doug earlier in this thread, doing more activity will help you get leaner, but there’s a point of diminishing returns. So there’s no one way to answer the question. The word “cardio” means something slightly different to everyone who uses it.

As a beginner, it’s crucial to understand the kind of effort you need to get the results you want in your workouts. With a lot of women, I think strength training becomes an extension of their cardio workouts. They choose weights that allow them to move at a continuous pace for an extended period of time. But that’s the opposite of what you want to do. You want to choose weights that are hard to lift by the end of the set, and you should be breathing hard by then. You shouldn’t be able to go from set to set without stopping to catch your breath.

So, to get back to your question about cardio, in theory there’s no problem with you doing some steady-pace, endurance-oriented exercise in between weight workouts. But if you approach the weight workouts the same way you approach the cardio workouts, you won’t get much out of either type of training.

Steady-pace endurance exercise is probably not going to change your body. It’s easy to adapt, and your body quickly becomes efficient. In the weight room, you resist adaptation by pushing yourself to use heavier weights, switching exercises, and moving on to more challenging workouts. That’s the entire point of the NROL books — to show you how to challenge yourself in a progressive, systematic way without having to figure it all out on your own.

Good luck with the workouts!

Welcome back!!! how was it in Kansas City!?

Wow, it’s sound great! I’m happy for u, Lou! I hope the next Summit is even better!