Training Myths That Won’t Die Ep. 2: Timing Cardio in Relation to Lifting ("Cardio Kills Gains")

Not really just one myth here but rather a whole lot of misunderstood ideas about timing cardio in relation to lifting when lifting (be it size, strength, or power) is your number one priority and you’re using cardio to get some secondary goal accomplished (fat loss, general health, recovery, etc..)

When you lift, a couple of different kinds of adaptations are set into motion. The nervous system begins to recover from the effort and upgrade its abilities, and the muscular system begins to arrange itself at the cellular and organelle level to engage in growth over the next several days. To be clear, muscle doesn’t actually grow much in the 3-6 hours after training, but the activity of certain molecular machinery (for example, the mTOR pathway) leads to a rise in muscle growth processes that tops out a day or so after training and falls back to baseline over the next few days after.

When you do cardio, you are more likely to not be sending the anabolic signals of muscle growth, but rather the signals of fuel availability and muscle endurance enhancement that are engaged by the activity of such pathways as AMPk. Not only is muscle breakdown an additional and direct effect of the AMPk pathway, it also suppresses anabolic pathways such as mTOR and reduces their activity.

So if we do weight training to at least in part stimulate muscle growth, we need to try to keep anti-growth stimuli (such as those created by cardio) from the sensitive window of several hours that follows training. Additionally, cardio burns many of the nutrients that would normally be used to recover the post-training muscles. Availability of nutrients (especially glucose and glycogen) can reduce the potential growth signaling as well, which is another consideration that doesn’t favor cardio post-training.

look dude, nobody actually thinks cardio kills gains, they just know it takes up 500 calories of your valuable stomach capacity

On the other hand, cardio pre-training can deplete the same glucose and glycogen levels that turn down adaptation directly. And in addition, being tired from cardio during your weight training can significantly reduce your performance in the session and thus limit the degree of the overloading stimulus you’re trying to provide.

Lastly, cardio adaptations (conversion of muscle fibers to act more slow twitch, for example) directly counteract adaptations to produce high power levels (strength AND speed), which includes different nervous system adaptations as well. Doing cardio if your sport has an important power component can be a very tricky enterprise. We’ll get to some implications of these basic facts in the next point.

― General Timing Recommendations
a. If you’re an athlete with a high power component and low endurance component to your sport (weightlifting or gymnastics, for example), consider not doing cardio at all. The fiber transitions and neural changes are likely to impact your performance in a significantly net-negative way. If you’re in these sports and trying to lose weight or fat, altering your training volume and diet is likely the best approach as opposed to including cardio.
b. If you have the choice or can make the arrangement, when you do actually do cardio, try to finish it 3 hours or longer before starting your weight training and not start it until 6 hours or later after your weight training. Of course, the further apart training and cardio can be, the better, and doing your best to spread them apart is a good idea even if you can’t quite hit the 3 and 6-hour marks. In the time that separates weights and cardio, eating plenty of protein and especially carbs and staying away from physical exertion as much as you can will lead to higher glycogen repletion, recovery, and better results for your lifting.

there is very little knowledge out there about how much stimulus is required to actually produce an mTOR response that would actually inhibit growth. the research is pretty inconclusive though. if you're running 10 or 15 miles everyday and lifting then yeah there is a large body of evidence to suggest that you will be inhibiting growth. but doing stuff like 10-15 minutes of high intensity interval style work has not been studied.

these recommendations are trash.
Muscle fiber type transitioning is still relatively poorly understood, and blanket statement that cardio adaptations=slow twitch is wrong. High intensity cardio work does not cause you to become more slow twitch.

c. If you’re training for strength, and you have to combine lifting and cardio into the same session, doing your cardio after your lifting is likely a good idea. This is because doing cardio before training can sap you of so much energy that your lifting performance will suffer too much and you won’t be able to create the high forces needed to best adapt and get stronger.
d. If you’re training for hypertrophy, you should consider doing your cardio before your lifting for two main reasons. First, you want to limit interference with the post-lifting anabolic pathways and second, you can probably still put in the volume needed to grow even if you’re a bit tired from cardio, since intensity is not nearly as much a factor with hypertrophy training as it is with strength training.

― Change Recommendations Based on Observations
If you try some cardio before your strength work and it doesn’t make you much or any less strong, you may very well be able to put cardio before strength training. This is especially true if that cardio is like a 20-30min incline walk on the treadmill; unlikely to reduce performance and might even enhance it.

On the other hand, if your cardio smashes you so hard that you can’t generate the kinds of volumes you need to for your hypertrophy training or if you’re using like half of your usual weights, perhaps you might have to put cardio after lifting. Obviously, the best solution here is to put the cardio in its own window some time far away from training, so don’t lose sight of that goal if and when your schedule allows. But insofar as you have to put them together, observe your responses and use the recommendations above just as general guides, not as dogma for every circumstance.

>500 calories of your valuable stomach capacity
>1 (one) glass of whole milk
Do you know
How I know
That you are a Skelly?

― Glycogen and Fat Burning
You might have heard before that it’s good to burn your glycogen off first by lifting to then burn more fat when you do cardio right after. And thus, the implication is that you should do cardio right after weight training for best fat loss results.
In reality, the overwhelming majority of research has yet to find a “better” time to do cardio, be it after weights, on an empty stomach, or after a balanced meal. As long as you get the calories burned that you planned and performed cardio at the volumes and intensities that you wanted, the results for fat loss and weight loss seem not to matter much.
These research findings make plenty of sense, because repleting glycogen takes carbs away from later meals and doesn’t let them store as fat. This means that if you burn the glycogen first to rely on fat burning in post-weights cardio or use the eaten carbs later for replenishing glycogen lost to anytime cardio, it matters little. You still lose very close to the same amount of daily calories and fat stores.

As long as you don’t drain your workout of energy by doing too much cardio right before or drain the anabolic signaling by doing too much cardio after training, just do your cardio when it’s convenient for you and you’ll get great results without having to do it right after training religiously.

― Different Cardio Types
f you’re doing cardio for max weight loss and general health and you’ve got the time, MISS is a top choice. Moderate Intensity Steady State cardio, akin to running 5 miles at a time at a roughly even pace has the advantage of burning the most total calories of all the modalities and thus powering the most weight and fat loss. Yeah, it risks muscle loss to a good degree in the highly trained especially and it does take quite some time to do, but for those who have the time and want the most health and weight loss results; it’s the likely best choice.

If you’re doing cardio for health and fat loss but you’re short on time in your average week, HIIT is your ticket. High Intensity Interval Training cardio is characterized by alternating sprints (or close) with walking or jogging-level exertions in between, and can be done outside, on a treadmill, on a bike, or even in the pool. It’s incredibly effective in burning a whole bunch of calories in very short timespans, but its downside is that it causes quite a bit of fatigue. Thus you can’t do it much, and many more than about 4 hard sessions of HIIT a week are not recommended for most. But if you’re short on time and want to lose fat, lose weight, and be healthier, HIIT is a great choice.

LISS is not recommended as a top choice for most folks. Low Intensity Steady State cardio is just like it sounds; incline walking on a treadmill, doing the stepmill very slowly, or any other modality that keeps your heart rate under 140bpm in most cases. The bad news about this modality is that to lose a lot of weight or fat with it, you have to do A LOT of it, as its low intensity just doesn’t burn calories very quickly. On the other hand, it hardly generates any fatigue, converts any muscle fiber types, or risks any injury, so it’s great for people looking to maximally conserve muscle while leaning out, including bodybuilders and powerlifters.

>don't do cardio if gymnast