I thought you wanted to be big and ripped??

For decades, bodybuilders have let themselves believe they need to eat like a bear preparing for hibernation — 8,000 or 10,000 calories a day—to build muscle. They balloon up in the off-season until they look like they belong in a powerlifting meet instead of a bodybuilding lineup. Then, after all that eating, they somehow have to strip off 40 pounds of fat in 12 weeks just to look like they even belong on a stage.

Who sold them that bridge? Where is it written that in order to grow muscle you need to grow a gut? Let me tell you, it isn’t written anywhere except on the blank page of collective gym mythology — otherwise known as “bro-science.”

As I’ve stated numerous times, muscle grows for one reason and one reason ONLY: the body is convinced it needs it. The only way to send that message is mechanical tension—big work, hard work, heavy work. Progressive overload, not progressive overeating. All the calories in the world won’t help you if the stimulus isn’t there. Muscle growth is part of our survival mechanism; the body builds it because it needs it. Period. Not because you want 21” arms.

Once that need is established through brutal, consistent training, your body only requires enough nutrients for repair and growth, and, if you’re taking PEDs, to maximize them as well. That’s it. Anything beyond that is excess. Part of the science of bodybuilding is figuring out exactly where that point in your body composition is and never crossing it.

But when people realized how little food they actually need, the industry came up with cardio. Cardio is a convenient excuse—a workaround—so you can keep grazing at the Chinese buffet and think you’ll burn it off on the treadmill. Then, somewhere down the line, somebody decided to promote the idea that cardio was anabolic, because cardio supposedly spikes growth hormone. So now, everyone thinks they have to do it or be at a disadvantage.

Are you kidding me? Most of these guys are already pinning growth hormone from a bottle anyway. And you want to do three hours a day of cardio to squeeze out another couple of IUs of endogenous GH? Congratulations—you’ve just turned your workouts into a catabolic swamp, hammering your recovery and draining your energy while you’re starving to death. Otherwise known as negative-sum gain. Which is not the goal.

The old-school guys dieted up to a show. They only did gear for eight to 10 weeks before a show. As they filled out and got leaner, they looked even bigger because the muscle popped through. They didn’t get “smaller”—they got fuller, tighter, and more dangerous. Because they didn’t have 40 pounds of blubber to melt off, their contest preps were shorter and less hellish, and their skin wasn’t all stretched out. Arnold and his crew? Steak, whole eggs, potatoes. That was their diet. They trained for hours, sure, but not on a treadmill. They pushed the weights faster, rested less, and burned calories under the bar.

Cardio? That Was For Boxers and Endurance Athletes

Here’s the part no one likes to admit: There’s a reason everyone clings to cardio. Because suffering—true dietary suffering—is beyond what most people can handle. When you have to cut calories to contest-prep levels, and you’re running on nothing but fish and broccoli for weeks on end, it’s the kind of misery that will have you contemplating slitting your wrists after day three.

This is not to say that doing hours of cardio a day isn’t gruesome—it is. You still feel like you’re starving—because you are, even though you’re eating enough to require the cardio. It just logically makes no sense. Eat less, do less, would be a better way to go.

Kevin Levrone did the broccoli and fish thing for 12 weeks straight. No cardio. Just diet, training, and suffering. Dorian? He didn’t immediately add cardio to his Olympia prep, and even then it was just 20 minutes a few times a week. Arnold, Franco and company? No cardio. John Defendis’s Ultra-Fit program? No cardio. All weight training, all diet, no hamster wheel. His clients get shredded, some of them hard as stone. Even me — no cardio, and I’m shredded all the time. It’s not genetics, it’s not drugs—although they do help—it’s your ability to suffer and stick to the grind. That is the key.

But today’s trainers and gurus? They prescribe cardio like judges handing out mandatory minimums to crack dealers. Hit the treadmill for an hour in the morning, an hour at night—all because you’re too chicken to close the refrigerator. That’s the truth. I’m not saying doing cardio while you’re dieting is easy. It’s not. But it’s also not necessary if you just eat less.

Cardio Does Not Offer a Net Benefit to Muscle Growth

Under calorie restriction, excessive cardio will do the opposite of you’re seeking—it will eat into your hard-earned muscle because the body needs amino acids, and if they’re not coming from your diet, they’ll come from the very tissue you’re trying to keep. Like it or not, the body will always strive to get what it needs, because what it needs is prime. What you want is irrelevant.

You want to be lean, hard, and separated? Accept the suffering. Lower the food. Train harder. Rest less. Get the same calorie burn through your sets. That’s how the legends did it. They didn’t have a stepmill. They didn’t have a Peloton. They had a barbell and a clock.

Think about it: If you train with enough intensity, enough volume, and enough consistency, you’ll burn plenty of calories. You’ll send the hypertrophic signal. Then you feed just enough to recover and grow. That’s bodybuilding. That’s what it has always been.

People today are so obsessed with being comfortable that they invented cardio to let them keep eating. And then they invented a myth around its supposed “growth hormone benefits” just to feel good about the hamster wheel. But what they’re really doing is wasting time and draining recovery that could go into more hard training—not to mention the needless wear and tear on your joints. You beat up those knees and hips with 15–20 hours of cardio a week, and one day you’re gonna have to serve somebody. And the sad thing is, it’s totally unnecessary.

Want proof? Go look at contest photos from the ‘80s and ‘90s. Those guys were tighter, denser, and harder than a lot of today’s pros. And they didn’t have fancy treadmills. They trained like animals, and they dieted. Almost no one did cardio. If they did, it was 20 minutes, three times a week. And no one monitored their heart rate. Many of them even went off most of their gear a month out—to help drive out the water.

If you want to get shredded, it comes down to this: You have to convince your body it needs more muscle, and it doesn’t need any stored fat. You do that in the gym with mechanical stress. Then you feed enough to grow. Anything beyond that gets converted into suffering. If you want to see the cuts and lines you built, you have to eat less, plain and simple. That’s going to hurt. That’s going to feel like you’re dying some days. And it sounds counterintuitive, but that is the price. All you have to do is prove it to make it right.

So no, you don’t need cardio to get ripped. You need to suffer. You need to accept that bodybuilding isn’t about comfort. It’s about creating a physique that looks impossible—and there’s nothing comfortable about that. If there were, everyone would be big and ripped. Because big muscles are cool, especially when they’re striated and covered in veins.

If you can’t stand the thought of being hungry, being weak, being flat for a while, then maybe this isn’t for you. Because there is no worse feeling than being underfed, overtrained, and still facing a set of squats with four plates on the bar. That’s the kind of desperation you can’t fake. That’s the kind of desperation that peels you to the bone.

And after all that, you’re going to do an hour of cardio? Come on. That’s the equivalent of getting your foot run over by a fire truck and calling it a pedicure.

If you want to get ripped? Train harder. Eat less. Accept the suffering. And stop doing cardio.

Once again: You can’t flex fat!

If this sounds like you: “But if I don’t eat four million calories, I’ll lose muscle,” “please allow me to unpack this fable for you.

Fat predominantly resides in two places—under the skin and inside the muscle—think of a marbled steak. Once the body stimulates lipolysis, fatty acids enter the bloodstream. This liberation of stored fat is not preferential. It happens all over at the same time. You can’t just burn off sub-Q fat and leave the intramuscular. It doesn’t work that way—it all goes concomitantly. It’s also deposited the same way.

So, back to that fat, juicy ribeye on your plate. Excise that giant lump of fat between the cap and the eye and push the steak back together. What happened? It got smaller. But did you lose any muscle? No.

So as you get leaner, your muscle will shrink because you’re burning the marbled fat inside the muscle. The correct metric is strength. Are you getting weaker? You can expect to feel a little weaker on very low calories, but most of that is in your head. A dramatic drop in strength, though, means you need to bump up the nutrients until you level off. Everyone is different. You have to go through these trials and errors on your own to figure yourself out.

Be that as it may, for many people—I’d venture to say most — they’re not losing muscle. They’re just afraid to eat less because they think if they do, they will. It’s just not true.

Remember, you can’t flex fat.