5 Training Mistakes That Make Lifting and Cardio Work Against Each Other | Ep 447
If you do both lifting and cardio, is your program optimizing for both without undermining each other?
It's not that combining them is bad, but that most people struggle to arrange their training week.
Philip walks through the 5 programming mistakes that create interference between your strength training and your conditioning, using the new Velocity 5-day Hybrid program from Physique University as the example of what it looks like when you fix all five.
You'll learn when to program your heaviest lifts, which days your sprint intervals should go on, how and when to use a dedicated "active recovery" day, and when to skip the extra conditioning work instead of pushing through it.
If you've been trying to build muscle and improve your cardio fitness at the same time and feel like neither one is progressing, this episode will show you where to look first.
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Join Physique University (Velocity + 10 other training templates): physique.witsandweights.com
Episodes Mentioned
Timestamps
0:00 - Lifting vs. cardio (does hybrid training create interference?)
4:55 - Mistake 1: Timing of cardio vs. heavy lifts
6:51 - Mistake 2: Superset pairings and muscle fatigue
8:28 - Mistake 3: Putting sprint intervals on the wrong days
10:27 - Mistake 4: To "active recovery" or not?
14:18 - Mistake 5: Doing THIS with every conditioning session
15:45 - Recovery starts with better sleep
17:00 - How the full training week fits together
19:33 - Sequencing vs. exercise selection
20:44 - Velocity 5-Day Hybrid Training program
22:32 - The 60-second hybrid program audit
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Philip Pape: 0:00
If you are both lifting weights and doing cardio, there is a chance that your program is not quite optimal. And it's not because combining them is a bad idea, but because most programs make these five structural mistakes that create unnecessary interference between the two. So today I'm going to walk you through all five using a hybrid program that we just built for Physique University as the example of what it looks like when you get these right. We talked about whether your fitness goals are in conflict with each other and covered how to combine strength training and endurance without killing your gains. And that came from some listener questions, Richard, Gerwin, a few others who wanted to know how to do both together. Today I'm getting a little more specific. Instead of whether you can combine lifting and cardio, we are looking at why most people who try to do these oftentimes don't get it quite right or suboptimally, or they get frustrated because it's not working for them, and then they get no results from either one. And it usually comes down to five programming mistakes. And you know, we're all about teaching you how to adjust your own programming and your nutrition. And that's what we're gonna do today. So to make this really concrete, I love stories, I love examples. So I'm gonna use a hybrid program that we just built for Physique University. It's called Velocity, and it's a five-day program. We're gonna use the principles from that program to walk you through these five mistakes so you can avoid them yourself, whether you jump in and use it, or you're creating your own program or evaluating someone else's program. If you want the full program, it is available inside Physique University. Go to witsandweights.com/slash physique. I'll tell you more about that later. But for now, I'm gonna show you the thinking behind it so you can spot these mistakes for yourself. And then stick around to the end because I'm going to give you a 60-second audit that you can run on your current program to find out if your conditioning work is incorporated with your strength training in the right way. So here's what we're gonna cover. First, the five mistakes and why each one creates interference between your lifting and your cardio. Second, what the fix looks like in a real program structure. And third, how to evaluate your own setup without having to overhaul everything. All right, let me paint you a picture of what most people's combined training looks like. I've looked at a lot of people's programs or they've suggested, hey, can I do this? Can I do that? And they might have a lifting program, a training program that's push-pull, leg split, or an upper lower split. And then they have goals for cardio. It could be conditioning for a sport, even with some teenagers I've worked with who are in baseball or basketball or football. It could be cardiovascular health, it could be for fat loss. And so they kind of fill in the gaps. Okay, they start with lifting, which I'm a big fan of prioritizing your lifting, but then they kind of try to fill in the gaps randomly. They, you know, they run on their off days or they tack a 30-minute jog or a sprint or whatever onto the end of leg day, and maybe they do hit classes or boot camp classes or whatever, whenever they feel like it, and kind of just throw it in there. And on paper, it seems uh reasonable, right? You're training both systems and you've got a schedule for your lifting, and then somehow you're getting your cardio in there. But the problem is that the approaches most people have are splitting up the recovery buckets and they're not thinking of it as a system. In other words, they have one for strength and one for cardio, and they're not thinking about the interplay between them, kind of the long tail between them, because that's a little bit more complex. It's it, or at least it seems complex, but we're gonna simplify it for you. Your nervous system doesn't know the difference between Tuesday and Wednesday, right? You have one recovery pool, one capacity pool. And when you drain the pool on, for example, a hard run the day before a heavy squat session, well, your squat session is going to suffer. And it's not because cardio causes interference, but because of the interaction between the two, the way you set it up is actually causing the interference. And that's the interference effect we talked about in episode 443, which looked at there was a study that looked at thousands of athletes that saw that the actual muscle building interference from concurrent training, okay, we're gonna use the term hybrid or concurrent training to mean both lifting and cardio, that the interference actually is close to zero when you set up your variables correctly, which is pretty cool. So if we've actually studied this and said, you know what, the interference effect really isn't much of a big deal when you set up your whole training program for the week up correctly. So let's go through those five mistakes. And if you avoid these, you're probably gonna be in pretty good shape. Mistake number one, doing conditioning before your heavy lifts. So if you run, if you bike, if you do even like a conditioning circuit before your heavy compound lifts, right? That's before your squat, your deadlift, your pressing, even variants of those lifts, like you know, strong lifts that require a good amount of energy and glycogen and everything else. If you do that, your force production on those lifts is going to drop. And we've seen that it could drop by 10 to 15% if you do a hard cardio session right before that. And that's a big number. That's not a small number. I mean, that's the difference between I'm gonna hit a new PR or I'm gonna grind through what I barely got last time. Right. So if you're trying to increase your weight, your heaviest work, especially the barbell work, the compound lists, things like that, need to come first in the session when you have a fresh nervous system, when your glycogen are full stores are full, when you're mentally ready to go too, because there is a little bit of a safety aspect we got to watch out for when we're fatigued. And so in our velocity training template, every lower body day opens with a barbell compound. It's either squat or deadlift. We do a three set of five in there. It's a pretty cool program, actually, because it's a it's a hybrid hybrid. It's actually a combo of heavy lifts, more like bodybuilding work, finishers, and cardio. It's pretty cool how we put it together. Coach Carol helped come up with the overall structure. I mean, she did most of the work. I'm gonna give her credit for that. So, Carol, if you're listening, all you, you get the credit, and that's why we love her. So when you look at the lower body day, it starts with the compound lift. Every upper body day opens with bench or overhead. Again, three sets of five. And then there's actually a fifth day in there because this is a five-day program. The fifth day is more of a true endurance conditioning core type of day. So those are your highest priority movements. Every everything else follows after. So that's mistake number one is doing your cardio first before you lift. Mistake number two is I'll say random pairings of usually supersets that we're doing, but even if they're not supersets, random pairings that fatigue the wrong things. So if you, for example, pair exercises that compete for the same stabilizers or grip strength that you need for your main lifts, you could be degrading performance across the session. And what I'm what I mean by this is you would rather pair movements that target different muscle groups or antagonist muscle groups, but different or antagonist, either one. Like antagonist would be biceps and triceps, different would be just completely different parts of your body. And that way one can recover while you do the other in the finish or in the, what do you call it, the superset? So in velocity, after the main compound, you're gonna see multiple superset pairings because we're trying to save you time in the gym so that you could fit in this cardio work, but also have a decent amount of you know, recovery and and time. I just said time three times. Uh, you're gonna see things like split squats paired with lying leg curls or incline bench paired with cable rows, right? Opposite or non-competing patterns. And that lets you get a decent amount of volume while saving time. So that's really all we're trying to do is get the volume in while saving time. But if you're trying to pair things up randomly, you may overfatigue things that then don't allow you to perform in the rest of the set or that end up taking longer, if that all makes sense. Okay, so that's that's mistake number two. Mistake number three is putting high intensity intervals on the wrong days of the week. And and this is where it gets tricky with hybrid programs because they might put like hit work or sprint work or something like that on a separate day, like an off day, until you realize that those also create some significant nervous system and metabolic fatigue. And that could carry over into the next day. So then it gets a little tricky, right? If you do a tough sprint session on Wednesday and then you try to deadlift on Thursday, that could give you a little bit more fatigue than you want going into Thursday. And you know, we had Steph Mager on the show. She's a power, she's an elite power lifter, and she talks about spacing apart where you hit your nervous system, and you have to be really smart about it. So in our program in Velocity, the sprint intervals appear on upper body days. That's that's really the key variable here, instead of the lower body days, because then after your upper body lifting and your supersets, you could do, let's say, your sprinting protocol, either flat ground sprinting or on a bike, rower elliptical, something like that. And the we've talked about this protocol before that I originally stole from Brad Kearns. 10 to 20 seconds all out, six to one rest to work ratio, four to eight sets. So about 10 to 20 minutes total. So when you do that, right on your upper body days, your legs are getting this relative break because you're upper doing the upper body. So the sprints are fresh for your legs, and then the sprint intervals are short enough that they help you develop, you know, that that anaerobic power, but they don't create so much stress that it carries over to the next lower body day, if that makes sense. So that's why we do lower upper, the cardio, kind of pure cardio day, and then lower upper. So you kind of get your upper before you get some rest from your legs instead of before your big leg days, if that makes sense. So again, the sequencing can really matter with a hybrid program. Mistake number four is skipping dedicated recovery days or smashing in more training into those days. Guys, you love, I know you love to go to the gym seven days a week, or you like to work on. Stop doing that. Okay. Zone to work, for example, the which is kind of that low intensity cardio where you can hold a conversation barely. I mean, it's it's it's tough. It's not like an easy walk, an easy breeze, but it's also not hit or super intense cardio. I would say it, it's it's kind of an underused tool. I don't talk about it a lot a lot because I don't usually train with the zones in mind. But when you're trying to add in some steady state cardio, it can be a helpful metric where if if you're not using the metric, you run the risk of just super easy cardio, which isn't getting you to the stress and the even the calorie burn that you're trying to get, or you run the risk of going too hard and overstressing yourself, right? So in in our program Velocity, the zone two shows up as, for example, we throw in incline walking after certain lifting sessions for like 20 to 30 minutes. And we give you the option, we say, look, you can incline walk, you can throw in a rucksack, you can go faster. The point is to progress in one of those variables over time, make it more difficult, or make it faster. And even though it's not there to burn calories, it will, it's really there to promote blood flow, it aids recovery, it builds your aerobic base, you know, your work capacity, but really without adding meaningful fatigue on top of the lifting fatigue and the stress, right? Because the aerobic system, right, the oxygen using system is what fuels your recovery between heavy sets. So if you have a better cardio base, then the faster you recover between sets and between sessions and between training weeks, which by the way is also why we have all these finishers and supersets in here. The whole thing is geared toward improving your cardiovascular fitness and conditioning, but in a really cool, structured, balanced way that lifters tend to enjoy, right? Let lifters tend to enjoy, as opposed to, say, CrossFitters. So when you look at day three of our five days, it's dedicated entirely to that zone two type movement, to some ab work. We actually have some loaded, some really good loaded ab work in kind of a superset fashion to get it done quickly. And a little bit of mobility, which to me is just kind of stretching and limbering up. It's nothing special. But if you have specific mobility protocols or yoga or whatever you like, go for and put it in there. Um, I just like I personally, you know, I have the shoulder where I had surgery. So doing some stretching for that is helpful. You know, there's actually no heavy lifting, there's no sprinting, but it's also not a rest day. It's more like what you would call active recovery. And there's a difference between all of that, right? You know, rest is doing nothing, which has its place for sure. In fact, it's a five-day program. So the idea is you have two days off. It doesn't have to be Saturday, Sunday. You have flexibility, and that's another variable that you can choose on your own that makes sense based on your work schedule, your sleep needs, your fueling, right? How you recover from one to the next. You can kind of mix it up a little bit. You can even stretch it out if you have to. Like if you're a little on the older side and you can't handle all that work, you can always stretch it out. But recovery is doing the things that actively help your body repair and adapt, you know, and that's where the the that day in the middle is kind of like we're gonna keep you moving forward and staying conditioned, stay active. We're gonna give you structure and something to do, but it's not gonna be slamming your fatigue level up further from another really, really heavy, hard session. And so that's kind of the stuff that a lot of lifters will skip, which is why we program it in. And one of my themes lately with a lot of personal clients, one-on-one clients, has been let's program in some of your conditioning and cardio because you're not gonna do it otherwise, even if that's just walks, even if it's just walks. So this can really be helpful to limber up, to work on those joints. And then mistake number five is treating every conditioning session as mandatory, regardless of how you feel. I I when as I was coming up with five mistakes, you know, I was wondering which one really floats up high here. And I would say this one is super powerful. So our program, again, Velocity, it has finishers at the end of lower body days. So this is like a four to five minute prescribed block of your dealer's choice, sled push, sled or prowler pushes, they're called, kettlebell swings, farmers' carries, things like that, just for a little bit of conditioning. You know, they're light. The program says, hey, these are optional. You can skip them if the energy is low, add them if you're well recovered, if you're, you know, trying to add a little bit more of the conditioning volume, you know, a little bit of extra calorie burn as long as you can do them. And I love programs that have that kind of flexibility built in. And it might be the most important mistake to avoid because your recovery capacity is going to change week to week, especially if you're like in fat loss or you have a high sleep stress situation or you're lacking on sleep or you're not fueling enough for nutrition, whether it's on purpose or not. And also accumulated training load, right? You start to build up fatigue over weeks and weeks doing a program. And a program that doesn't account for that's not a smart program, right? And that doesn't always mean D-loads, by the way, right? I the way I do this program, it doesn't even have a D load. You can program them in if you want, but it's just really a schedule, right? It's a schedule that's smart, that that balances your training, your conditioning, your finishers, all of that stuff. So the mindset where you're always pushing and never adapting is the problem when it comes to this mistake, treating treating like these full-on sessions as is exactly what you have to do all the time. You have to have a little bit of auto-regulation or optionality already built in so that you don't feel like, oh, I failed or because I didn't do that. Right? I'd rather have extra things that are optional than too many things that you have to cut out randomly and then you feel like you're not doing enough for doing what you're supposed to do. Now, I just said that your recovery capacity changes week to week based on your sleep, your stress, and your nutrition. And we do spend a lot of time talking about training and nutrition, but sleep is the one people I say most underinvest in, and it's the one that controls everything else. And I'm a huge fan of one company in particular. They sponsor this show. They're called Cozy Earth. And I have several of their products. One of those are pajamas. I never wore pajamas before. I thought they were pointless, they were always too hot, uncomfortable. And then I tried their bamboo-derived pajamas, and I wear them now. I wear them now because they are lightweight, they're cool, they don't make me overheat, and I feel like I'm recovering and relaxing. And it's great to just have something luxurious to relax in. And then another luxurious thing that I've been using of theirs lately is the cuddle blanket. They call it the classic cuddle blanket, and it is super, super, super thick. My kids love it. It's super soft, feels like they're hamsters or even softer than that. We throw it on the couch, it's big enough to share, right? You can use it just for yourself and kind of really cuddle in and get warm, or you can share it with somebody else. And again, another good way to relax. So I like little elements of luxury in the in the home. If you have, if you want to splurge, if you want to buy a gift for someone, I think it's great. Go to witsandweights.com/slash cozy earth. Really good company. I'm into very stand-up companies who back their stuff up. Cozy Earth has a hundred night sleep trial. They have a 10-year warranty. So you don't have to stress about it. If it doesn't work, you can return it. You know, no harm, no foul. Just get comfortable. Work on that recovery, work on that sleep. This is one way to do it. Support the podcast by checking out witsandweights.com slash cozy earth. The code will show up. It's wits and weights for 20% off. It'll show up when you go to the website. Go to witsandweights.com slash cozy earth and just take care of yourself, guys. All right. So now you've seen the five mistakes. I'm going to zoom out and show you what it looks like when you fix all five and everything clicks together. What does that look like? All right, so I mentioned our program Velocity. It runs five days. Days one and four are lower body. They open with a barbell, compound lift. So you've got squats and deads. Then you have a couple superset blocks for accessory work, the optional finisher that I mentioned, and then some zone two work like incline walking or however you want to make the walking harder. And again, that's a good way to structure in your walking. So that's days one and four. We have a couple upper bodies in day there as well, days two and five. Same logic, heavy compound first. So you've got bench and overhead. And by the way, you could always have variations on these. So whether it's a close grip or maybe an incline shoulder press or whatever. And then two superset blocks and then sprint intervals on those days. And then day three in the middle is your active recovery and movement day where we throw in some of the zone two, some of the loaded ab work, and then some mobility in there. And if you think of the rhythm, you know, heavy lower, heavy upper recovery, heavy lower, heavy upper, it's a logical sequence where you never have two lower body days back to back. You never do sprints the day before squats or deadlift. So it's intentional. And that's what I mean when I say programming is about the relationships between training stimuli. It's not just the stimuli themselves, and I like the word stimuli. Every individual session in velocity is fine on its own. That's fine. But what makes a system is how each day sets up the next day and accumulated fatigue and stress and adaptations. So the upper body day creates relative lower body recovery while still training your anaerobic system, your work capacity through the sprinting. The recovery day sits in the middle, so you sit the second half of the week, or you hit the second half of the week as freshly as the first. It's almost like two mini weeks within a week. So you're always recovering in between. And then that zone two walking after lifting doubles as active recovery that, let's be honest, you're not going to do otherwise if I don't tell you to do it. So that's why it's in there. If you look at your own training week right now, how you're training, if you're assuming you're trying to get in conditioning, work capacity, cardio, things like that, regardless, if it doesn't have intentional sequencing, that's probably your biggest ROI. That's probably where the biggest gains are hiding in your program. And just because you got a program from a coach or an app or whatever, doesn't mean it's optimized for those things. A lot of programs are not structured very well. And you can just rearrange it to make it work better for you. All right, before we wrap up, I promised you a 60-second program audit that you can do right now on your own training setup. I'm gonna share that in just a moment. But if this episode has you looking at your training week differently, then I wanna just remind you that there is a ready-made turnkey program in Physique University called Velocity. It's one of our 10 plus training templates we've got for you that are super flexible. They cover a lot of different scenarios. And Velocity specifically is a five-day hybrid template built from the ground up, and it avoids every one of the mistakes we covered today. I'm not going to go through it again because we just went through the structure a couple times, but Velocity is one of over 10 customizable templates we have. Whether you train three, four, five days a week, whether you have a full gym or a garage setup or you're traveling, every template can be adjusted for the equipment and preferences using a built-in substitution lookup that we have. Also, every one of our programs is in Boost Camp. So if you want to use an app, once you're in, you can go in, click the link, import it, and immediately run it in the app. I've set them all up in the app for you, including Velocity. And then there's of course a library of lessons, short modules on everything from how to breathe and brace under a barbell, what rest periods to use for different goals, what equipment to put in your gym bag. Like there's so many things. If you want to go deeper on the cardio side, we also have something called. The adaptive cardio workshop in there, the replay, the guide are in there. In other words, there's plenty of resources to learn from and then apply with our help in Physique University. And you get access to me and Coach Carol for questions. Yes, from real human beings who we can help with your programming. We can do form checks, all of that. Just go to wits and weights.com slash physique. That's witsandweights.com slash physique. All right, here's a quick way to tell if your current program is set up for hybrid training correctly or it's working against yourself. All right. I want you to answer three questions. Look at your program and answer three questions. Question one, do your heaviest compound lifts come first in every session? If not, your strength work is probably at a little bit of a disadvantage. Number two, are your high intensity conditioning sessions, maybe that's sprints, hit, whatever you do, are they separated from your heavy lower body days by at least 24 hours? So, like if you're sprinting the day before heavy squats or deadlifts, that could be an issue, could be an issue for you. Number three, do you have at least one day per week that's dedicated to low intensity recovery work? All right. And this is more of the active recovery. And this is mainly just for you guys who are not walking enough or you're not moving enough to think of this as training. I don't care if it's zone two or mobility or core work. I don't care. None of that, it doesn't, it's just having something in there that you're doing to get you moving, right? And that can really help with the blood flow and the recovery and the joints and all of the other stuff to kind of keep your overall week fairly active while you still have a couple true rest days in there. So if you said no to any of those three questions, then you just have to rearrange the program you already have. You don't necessarily need a new one. Just go through this episode, listen to the mistakes and the tips that I gave you and try to rearrange it, or jump into physique university, witsandweights.com slash physique, and we'll help you do that. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, sometimes the biggest gains come from rearranging your current training plan, not adding more. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.
