There is an easy mistake to make in fitness which is to focus more on muscular exercise over cardiovascular fitness, or vice versa, which leads to an unwanted end result, or more often, no results at all because a regime has not been followed properly. To this end, it’s important for any budding fitness enthusiast to work out whether they want go down the route of improving overall fitness or bulking up and taking the muscle-building avenue.
Muscle building is a specific, niche area of fitness that goes over and above the usual visit to the gym. It does not stop at a few minutes or even a few hours on the treadmill and requires not only regular, hard resistance based training but an array of dietary considerations. In short, muscle building is not just something we can achieve by running and lifting a few weights; anyone who is bulked up and muscular is that way because they put in the hours.
General aerobic and cardiovascular exercise is, on the hand, much easier and a much more accessible form of exercise. If we do it correctly, we can achieve a healthy cardiovascular system with only a few visits to the gym a week, with optional extra exercise in and around our lives. Furthermore, it doesn’t require a toned, muscular physique, and in fact most people who are aerobically fit probably don’t feel as though they look it. It also requires only sensible dieting as opposed to a rigorous regime such as with muscle building.
The two are often mixed in together by gym goers who do not understand the two, or are not fully aware of just what is required. Casual gym users taking protein supplements, for instance, and then only finding extra pounds further down the line. Conversely, muscle builders who don’t do their due diligence later find they have no fat to convert to muscle, and simply end up with an abundance of lean muscle or none at all.
Both general fitness and muscle building require specific steps to be taken; they cannot be combined, and to misunderstand this will simply cause you to have a set of failed fitness goals.
