Hrd,

Well, I was more thinking about the kids who spend all day in pick up games of full court. It is a series of "sprints" for SOME plays, but more often than not the pace is slow enough that it really just ends up being a ton of calorie munching movement. Not bad at all if you are looking to lose fat, but for preserving muscle, I wouldn't suggest this. I just know that some of my friends and co-workers will go play in three hours of pick up games after work and there is virtually no way they can hope to build muscle doing that. Maybe if for no other reason than they just burnt up all the food they could have built muscle with. I could have just as easily said hockey or tennis or whatever. The point is that you want to get in some cardio, but when you are making it a significant portion of your overall training volume I think any kind of cardio is a liability to building muscle. I say "I think" only because there may be some example that I have not considered.