question

[elchrisso]

over the last few months (from about mid march up until late may) i was doing alot of running (as well as upper body circuit training -pressups,pullups,situps etc) i followed an asics program which worked really well, i was running about 7 miles in 55mins. My a-levels started around the end of may though, so i had to pack it in for a while and now that they're over i've started back at the weights again which i had great progress with over this last year and i would like to know whether building up fitness thru running those sort of distances is possible to do at the same time as building up some of the bulk i lost after taking a break from the weights, or do they have to be done seperately? i would have thought seperately due to the number of calories needed to grow but a professional opinion would help very much,

thanks :)

[BFS]

The short answer would be yes. However the body is more efficient when focusing on one aspect of fitness at a time.
The difficulty is that when building muscle you need to eat more protein and carbs so that the body has a surplus of energy and can use this to grow. Runnning burns up energy, and so you need to eat even more. Then it becomes a balancing act of nutrition.

If you are extremely disciplined with your diet and eat enough quality protein and carbs then you can still build muscle.
The option is to go through an 8 week muscle building program, while maintainng a base fitness. Then after that maintain your muscle mass and work on you fitness.

[elchrisso]

thanks for the advice bfs :thumbsup: makes sense