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Originally Posted by Master X  Minsc why does cardio break down the muscles? |
When you're doing cardio, your blood-sugar level is going to fall since your muscles are going to use it up.. To raise it back up again, since you're not going to eat, your body would have to break down muscle or fat.
Assuming you're doing something like running, fat isn't going to be efficient enough to break down, since your body can't derive much glucose from it and would mostly have ketones, and I'm not sure how well those work as fuel for a muscle.. If it breaks some muscle tissue down, it'd have protein and maybe glucose. Protein can be broken down into glucose in a pretty simple way but it's still a little inefficient..
There's some article on it:
Gluconeogenesis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"or intense exercise" (I'm assuming they meant intense cardio since you don't burn up much energy in strength training as far as I know)