What cardio is for in a prep
The diet creates the fat-loss deficit. Cardio’s job is smaller and more surgical: extend the deficit modestly when the data says the descent has genuinely stalled, without stealing more recovery than it pays for. That framing matters, because every hour of cardio spends recovery currency that lifting needs, and lifting is what holds your muscle while you diet.
Start preps with cardio low, sometimes near zero, and hold dial capacity in reserve. The competitor doing two daily hours in week four has no moves left by week twelve. The one still holding dials in reserve at week twelve finishes sharp.
The menu, honestly
LISS, the workhorse. Walking, incline treadmill, easy cycling. Cheap to recover from, easy to dose precisely, compatible with hard lifting. The later weeks of most preps are built on it, headphones in, podcast on.
Intervals, the concentrate. More burn per minute, real recovery cost. Useful earlier in preps and for athletes who keep conditioning year-round, but expensive exactly when prep recovery is scarcest. Dose with respect.
Steps, the stealth layer. A daily step target is cardio smeared invisibly across the day, and it is often the first dial turned: from 7,000 to 10,000 steps is meaningful deficit with nearly zero recovery cost.
Panic cardio, the classic blunder
Every prep hits a scary week: the scale stalls, the mirror gaslights, the show creeps closer. The untrained response is to double cardio overnight. The physique responds by arriving on stage smaller, flatter, and stringier, having burned muscle it spent months building. Judges see it instantly.
The trained response is boring: check the data trend, turn one dial one notch, wait a week. Boring is what champions are made of. My cardio through the 2026 NPC Missouri State prep, the one that won the overall, was dialed exactly this way: as part of a system, never as penance.
