Strength Training and Endurance Together (Without Killing Your Gains) | Ep 443

Do you love endurance training AND want to build muscle, but you've been told you have to pick one?

The "cardio kills gains" claim has been around for decades, and if you're over 40, it can feel like an impossible tradeoff between the activities you enjoy and the strength training your body needs.

However, the "interference effect" on hypertrophy is negligible when sessions are structured correctly, and adults over 40 might have an advantage.

Philip breaks down the evidence-based programming rules that let you combine strength training and endurance without compromising either. You'll learn about the session timing strategy backed by research, why running and cycling create different types of interference, the specific protein and carbohydrate targets concurrent trainees need (especially after 40), and how to monitor recovery so you know when to push hard and when to back off. If you want to stay strong, fit, and healthy for decades through both lifting weights and endurance work, this is your roadmap.

Shoutout to listeners Richard G. (60+, cyclist) and Gerwyn (56, runner and cyclist) who both asked how to optimally balance endurance sports with strength training and nutrition.

Try the Fitness Lab app to get daily adaptive coaching that adjusts your strength training and endurance programming week to week based on your priorities and recovery. Whether you're in a strength-focused block or transitioning to endurance prep, the Coach recalibrates your training, nutrition, and recovery plan as your focus shifts. Exclusive 20% off:
https://bit.ly/fitness-lab-pod20

Ask a question for the show: witsandweights.com/question

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Timestamps

0:00 - Does cardio kill your gains? 
2:07 - What the interference effect really means
5:05 - New evidence shrinks the interference effect
6:31 - Fatigue model vs. molecular myth
9:14 - 6-hour cardio scheduling rule
11:15 - Exercise order and same-day strategy
12:18 - Running vs. cycling for muscle building
15:03 - 80/20 cardio split
16:15 - How to program hybrid training
17:59 - Why over 40 benefits most
20:32 - Bone density and longevity
21:28 - Protein and carb targets for building muscle
23:10 - Creatine and sleep 
27:10 - Bonus: 10-second morning recovery check 

• Transcript

  Philip Pape: 0:01

  Does cardio really kill your gains? You've heard it before, and if you're over 40 and you love running, you love cycling or anything endurance, that advice puts you in an impossible spot. Give up what you love or accept that you'll never build real muscle. And it turns out that neither is true. The latest research on over a thousand athletes shows that the interference effect, the idea that endurance training blocks muscle growth, is close to zero when you set up your training correctly. So today you're gonna learn the one scheduling rule that eliminates most of the interference, why running and cycling affect your strength differently, and how much protein concurrent trainees actually need. Spoiler, it is more than you think. And this episode exists because of two listeners who asked me the same question within days of each other. And the first one is Richard G. He's over 60, he's a lifetime athlete, he's a physique university member, and he wrote to me and he said, Quote, my main question is how I can optimally combine the endurance sports I'm passionate about with the weight training and nutrition optimization to get the optimal results for the years to come. And then we have Gerwin, who is 56, and asked almost the exact same thing, quote, how to balance cardio running and cycling endurance activities with strength training. And if you want to submit your question for the show, just go to witsyweights.com slash question and I'll give you a shout out just like I did today. Two people, the similar demographic, same question, same frustration. So, Richard Gurwin, this one is for you. Shout out to you. And if you're in a similar spot, if you're training for endurance and lifting together and you're wondering if one is maybe canceling out the other or you can't do both, you're gonna want to hear this. By the way, last week's, or yeah, the last solo episode I did was about handling conflicting goals. So there's some similarities here, but we're really getting into endurance specifically and how to do that with your lifting. If you stick around to the end, I'm gonna share a 10-second recovery check that can tell you whether your body can handle tomorrow's hard session or if you need to back up, it just takes 10 seconds. All right, here's what we're covering today. First, why the cardio kills gains narrative is pretty outdated at this point, and what the actual interference data looks like as of the last few years. Second, the practical programming rules that let you train both without compromising. And third, the nutrition and recovery factors that most concurrent trainees are still getting wrong, especially after 40. And we're gonna fix that today. Okay, let's start with what you've probably been told that if you want to build muscle, if you want to minimize, or if you want to build muscle, you have to minimize cardio, or do just walking, don't do too much other types of cardio, keep it short, do it on separate days. If you have to do it, whatever you do, don't run. Okay, and it might sound like some advice I've given to some extent, but again, context is everything. And the general advice where this whole, like, you know, lose fat and build muscle without cardio, it's called the interference effect, the idea that cardio interferes with building muscle. And it was first described back in 1980 by Robert Hickson. He showed that combining strength and endurance training in the same program produce smaller strength gains than strength training alone. And for about four decades, the fitness industry turned that into a blanketed rule that you have to pick one or the other. And even as I got into this space about five, seven years ago, it was still a fairly dominant narrative. And I've only recently started to see more concurrent and hybrid training philosophies take hold as we see, you know, big, strong, jacked, healthy, fit people doing both. So if you are someone who does it because you love it, you love to ride a bike, you like to run, you love to swim, you love to hike, any kind of endurance work. And yes, there are people like that. I say that a little bit jokingly because to be honest, I do love sprinting, I do love hiking, I do love riding a bike occasionally. So I so are there are modes of cardio that I enjoy. And I and I assume you as a listener, there's something you enjoy. You don't do it just because you're trying to burn calories or do exercise. There, you know, maybe it's associated with an activity like a sport. And then you also want to build or maintain muscle. Of course, we want to do that no matter what, especially as we age. And so this puts you in a little bit of a bind, right? Do you give up the activities that keep you, you know, sane and healthy and you enjoy them, or do you just accept subpar results and in the gym? And this is what I call a false dichotomy. You don't have to choose, it's not one or the other. You're not asking the right question. And the research from the last few years makes this really clear. So we are evidence-based here, meaning we want to combine research with, you know, scientific papers, with evidence, with anecdote, with coaching experience, all of it together, as well as what you found out about yourself. Let's talk about the research. A 2022 meta-analysis in sports medicine looked at 43 studies. There were over a thousand subjects, and they found the effective endurance training on hypertrophy, that's building muscle, that's muscle size, was actually close to zero. Actually, not even very small. It was pretty much zero statistically. The standardized mean difference was negative 0.01, and for maximal strength, it was 0.06. Not statistically significant. The only measurable interference was on explosive power, and even that went away when people separated their training sessions. And then really recently, just a little over a year ago, 2024, a meta analysis of 59 studies, over 1,300 participants confirmed this, but they added a little bit of nuance. In men, there were some lower body strength interference, and in women, there wasn't any. Neither group showed a meaningful interference for upper body strength or hypertrophy. So the interference effect, the way you could state this truthfully is it is real, but far smaller than people claim or think, and it's highly conditional. It's context-based. It depends on how you structure your sessions, what type of endurance work you're doing, and whether you're recovering adequately. And the recovery, I think I was I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, and he said, look, recovery is the one training variable, the one goal that never goes away. So why does interference happen when it does happen? And for many years, the explanation was, I'll say, molecular. There's an enzyme called AMPK that gets activated by endurance exercise. And it was supposed to inhibit mTOR, the pathway that drives muscle protein synthesis. I mentioned this on the last episode. Endurance flips one switch, strength flips the opposite, and when you do both, they cancel out, and maybe one interferes with the other in terms of an adaptation. Nice, clean, simple model, and there's some problems with it. Okay. There's nuance, I should say, because actual human studies have failed to confirm this. One study found that 30 minutes of cycling at 70% VO2 max after a resistance training session did not reduce mTOR signaling at all. Another show that HIT combined with training elevated mTOR above resistance training alone. So, this what they call antagonism, you know, the opposite effect, the AMPAK and the mTOR antagonism that we see in like a cell culture or in, let's say, rat studies, doesn't necessarily translate cleanly to humans who are doing real-world training. And this is just a thing that we see a lot in the research. People make inferences or extrapolations based on rodent models or based on what they see in a petri dish, and it doesn't always apply at the systematic human level. And so the emerging consensus, and this is from just last year, 2025 review, is that interference is better explained by what's called a residual fatigue model. So when interference happens, it's because the accumulated fatigue from endurance work compromises the quality of your resistance training. So that's a very interesting, different way to think about it, isn't it? It's about the accumulated fatigue from the endurance work. Okay. It's where you show up to do a squat, heavy squats, after you had a hard run the day before, you know, like a 5K run or something, and your legs are kind of cooked and you can't hit those planned weights. You just have too much fatigue, and then over time, that's even more fatigue and less stimulus of strength. And so this is a reframe on this. It's very helpful because fatigue is a problem of your programming and your recovery, not the fact that you're doing strength training with cardio. And so we have solutions to this. Ah, so that leads me to the next section, which is the the the how to manage this biological thing that we can control, which is fatigue, but not the molecular thing that we can't control, which turns out to not be the cause anyway. All right, so there are three levers here that matter the most of how to manage your programming to eliminate any chance of interference. It's your timing of your sessions, it's the order of your exercises, and it's the endurance modality. So let's walk through each one, okay? First, session timing. This is the most powerful variable. And if you only take one thing from this episode, make it this. All right. So again, looking at the evidence, a 2016 study on 58 rugby players compared doing strength and endurance in the same session, separating them by six hours, and separating them by 24 hours. The six-hour group saw 12.8% greater lower body strength gains than the same session group. And then the 24-hour group did the best of all. So the takeaway is to separate your strength and endurance sessions by at least six hours if you can. If you could even put them on different days entirely, even better. And so the practical tip I have is that if you can put strength and endurance on separate days, you'll get the best outcome. Second best is on the same day, but at least six hours apart. And then the third best is the same session, but start with your strength training, then do your cardio. The worst case is the same session with endurance first. And I would say, even for endurance athletes, this is still a good approach. So that's it. That's your cheat sheet for how to schedule your training sessions. Um by the way, we are putting together, we're putting together a hybrid training program in physique university that that has the middle ground. It actually has small manageable resistance or cardio work prescribed after, right after certain training sessions, but we only do that to make it a prescribed thing. You could always put them on your rest days. It's a five-day program, so you could always put them on the other days. But sometimes for practicality, it makes more sense to put them together. So that's the timing. Now, second is exercise order. When you do have to train both in the same session, so that was a good segue after I just said that, you're gonna lift first. There have been studies that show that you have greater lower body strength gains when you start with lower body and then do cardio. And oftentimes I tell people to put the cardio on upper body days, but we don't see as big effects on hypertrophy. So strength and hypertrophy, two different things. The strength is what often gets hit, and that doesn't, it's not all like a be all end all. Depends on what your goal is. If you're somebody who's trying to do both lifting and hypertrophy and cardio, you may not be going after absolute total strength gains. But even if you are, again, it depends on the order and the and the timing. So it doesn't really have an effect on hypertrophy or static strength, what they call, or VO2 max or body composition. And if I I think the study showed that the strength first advantage was most pronounced at a twice per week frequency. So if you're only hitting the gym twice a week and adding cardio after, make sure the barbell comes first and then the cardio afterward. Now, so that's that's exercise order. I hope I was clear on that. Just basically lift first. Okay. Now, endurance, the endurance mode or modality, and this is interesting because I think it's counterintuitive. So take running and cycling, they affect your strength differently. And and I pick those two specifically because they use the legs and they're different than walking. Like we all we all know that almost intuitively a walking is a pretty relaxing, low interference type thing. But of course, if you start hiking or adding a rucksack or something, then it approaches something closer to running a little bit. But let's just take running and cycling. So, what is running? Well, running involves repetitive, eccentric loading. Every foot strike requires your muscles to absorb force, and that creates more muscle damage, which means more inflammation, which means longer time to recover. Whereas cycling is predominantly concentric. You're pushing against the pedal, against the resistance, right? Whether it's just a free bike or it's an assault bike or a spin bike or whatever, and you don't have the impact-driven damage that you have from running. So you'd expect cycling to cause less interference, correct? Okay, you know this is a trick question. At moderate intensities, that is what the data shows. Running produces a lot more, what they call decrements, right? Reduction in hypertrophy and strength. And cycling doesn't. So at moderate intensities, running is not as great. But at high intensities, it actually flips around. High intensity cycling creates significant local fatigue in your quads. And those happen to be the muscles that you test when you do legs, squats, and leg presses, like in these lower body studies. So the interference becomes muscle group specific. So if it's muscle group specific specific, what is the takeaway here? Well, the takeaway is if you can keep most of your endurance work at low intensity, you're gonna avoid this. And that's if you like zones, that's like zone two conversational pace or less, obviously. And it's Andy Galpin. He's he's actually the guy behind behind Vitality Blueprint, where we've partnered with our blood work analysis. He he the way he put it is zone two has almost no ability to block hypertrophy when you're working at a conversational pace. So it becomes just as recoverable and zero impact as walking. All right. So an easy, a long, easy ride, even a slow run might be perfectly fine, is what I'm getting at. What creates the problems is accumulating too much time in that moderate to hard middle zone, like zone three and four work, that generates significant fatigue and and doesn't produce the unique adaptations either. So about 80% easy and 20% hard for your cardio, it lines up really well with concurrent training. 80% easy cardio and 20% hard cardio. However you want to define that. It's kind of in the context of zones, the way I just put it, but a lot of that, a lot of that's gonna be very individualistic based on your biofeedback. And when you do this split, the 80-20, you get the cardiovascular benefits from the easy work, right? Because you do, you get cardiovascular benefits even from walking and from lifting, as we've talked about recently. You also get the performance stimulus from the hard session. So if you're trying to improve your endurance performance, the specificity, right? Or power or some speed or something like that, and then you're not accumulating what you might call junk fatigue in the middle. All right. So that kind of clarifies the big takeaways on what to do about it. Remember, stick around to the end because I'm I have a 10-second recovery check that's going to be super helpful. And if you're thinking, okay, how do I actually structure my week to balance both cardio and strength training? And again, a perfectly smooth segue into talking about my app Fitness Lab because a lot of you aren't sure what it even does. I actually sent out a question in my list and said, Hey, why haven't you tried checked out Fitness Lab? And a lot of people say, Well, I'm not really sure if it's going to help me. Well, here's a cool thing that it does. Very specific. Okay, very specific thing it can do. When you onboard, it asks about how you like to train and whether you have endurance priorities or not, and whether you're working with a trainer or you want the program, the app to make your training for you. But then at any time from the rest of the time you start using the app, there's a coach in the app. It's basically an AI chatbot, but it's trained on all my stuff as well as a little bit of my personality. I like to joke that I'm trying to replicate myself. It's like a replicant. And you can tell that coach at any time, hey, my priorities are changed, or I want to focus on strength versus endurance or versus cardio, or I have a run coming up, I have a competition coming up, I have a powerlifting meet coming up, and it will say, All right, let's, we're gonna tweak your activities going forward, your training, your nutrition, your recovery recommendations exactly around that thing you want to do. And so if your focus shifts right in the middle of the year or a few months from now, you know, maybe you're building strength to begin with, and then you're like, oh no, I really want to do this bike race or this ultra marathon. You could tell it, how about this is coming up on this date. Help me come up with a training plan. And it will come up with an entire training plan to do that based on the evidence, and it's gonna map it out and then start giving you those specific training protocols and activities going. I mean, literally, it'll tell you your runs, it'll tell you your lifting sessions, it'll tell you what to do. And the whole thing just recalibrates, right? That's what's really cool about the app. I really wanted to share that because I'm so passionate about how much it's helping people without they don't have to overthink it. They don't need a trainer, they don't need a lot of things that we needed in the past, and now technology allows us to do it. Anyway, check out the show notes for 20% off link that's in there for Fitness Lab. You won't regret it. Try it out. Try it out and let me know what you think. We're always making improvements, we're always fixing bugs and all that good stuff as well. All right, so we've covered the training mechanics, and now I kind of want to zoom out because this episode is specifically for people in the 40 to 60 plus range, just like our two listeners. And the case for combining strength and endurance training is actually stronger for this demographic demographic than any other. Surprise if you're surprised to hear that, let me explain. Okay, I'm gonna give you a number. A large-scale study found that people who do both resistance and aerobic exercise have a 40% reduction in all-cause mortality compared to people who do neither. Now, from strength alone, it's 21%. From aerobic alone, cardio alone, it's 18 to 29%, but the combination produces this synergistic reduction in all-cause mortality of boom, 40%. That is huge. For preserving muscle, the stakes are really high, right? We know this. This is why we talk about strength training. You lose 3 to 8% of muscle mass per decade after age 30, it accelerates after 60. And then endurance-only athletes have it way worse because they maintain some semblance of cardiovascular fitness, but then they preferentially lose type two muscle fibers. Those are the fast twitch fibers responsible for power output and fall prevention because they're not lifting weights. And so that just exacerbates the problem as you age. And here's something to reassure the endurance athletes who are listening. Okay, I am on your side. As much as in the past, I might have poo-pooed cardio just a bit. You know, we've done lots of things in the last year alone, including physique university with our adaptive cardio workshop that we did that acknowledges how important cardio is within this context. A 2022 meta-analysis specifically looked at whether age modifies the interference effect. It doesn't. It doesn't. The over 40 subgroup had no greater interference than people in 18 to 40 group. And the probable reason is most people over 40 who are adding strength training are probably pretty new to it, and untrained individuals show virtually no interference. And there was another analysis that confirmed this untrained subjects had an interference effect close to zero. So the irony here is that the population most worried about interference, those of you over 40, over 50, even in your 60s, older endurance athletes adding lifting for the first time, that's the population least likely to experience interference. All right. So if you're over 40 and you've been doing endurance your whole life and you're now just adding strength training, don't worry about it. Do it. Go do it. The interference effect is basically not a factor for you. For bone density specifically, combining training is one of the most effective non-uh-pharmacological strategies against age-related bone loss. And this is really important for cyclists, for swimmers, because non-weight-bearing sports provide just the bare minimum of bone stimulus on their own. A lot of people think somehow like biking is gonna, you know, help maintain your bone. It's not. It's not. If cycling is your primary activity, you're not lifting, you are missing a huge piece of your skeletal health. And that's just to maintain your bone density. If you've already experienced bone loss or osteoporosis, really the only way to reverse that is a combination of strength training and some impact work, some kind of jumping and impact work, which beyond the scope of this episode, I just wanted to throw that in there. All right, so that's the training side. Separate your sessions, lift first when you can, keep most endurance, low intensity, and don't panic about this whole interference thing. But none of that is gonna work if, guess what, your nutrition and your recovery aren't supporting this dual demand. And that is where a lot of concurrent trainees are hurting themselves because the errors are very common in this population and they're often invisible. And we like to talk about those things and make them visible on this show. So, starting with, we're talking nutrition here. Starting with protein, there are some standard recommendation recommendations out there. And we talk about the like 0.7 grams per pound minimum for you know for athletes, for people who listen to the show, for people who lift weights. I would say if you're doing concurrent training, you should probably have more protein, like be closer to the one gram per pound, maybe a little more, but one at least. And that's because endurance exercise activates an enzyme that increases leucine oxidation, meaning your body burns through more amino acids during that aerobic work. So there's less available for muscle repair afterward. There was a study that showed plasma leucine dropping by 11 to 33% during or after cardio sessions. And so it's just, it's just a to be safe kind of thing. Like I would get more protein. You're just doing more overall volume and activity anyway. And then if you're in a fat loss phase, if you're in an energy deficit, I tend to recommend higher fat or higher protein in those phases anyway. For older trainees who are doing concurrent training, I would say that the per meal doses, well, the total daily intake is always the most important thing. But I would also encourage, you know, having protein at every meal anyway, not necessarily for the protein stimulus or the anabolic response, more for practicality to make sure that you get enough protein. That's more of a practical tip. So that's protein. Carbs, this is where so many people are undereating, especially if you're doing cardio. And I think it matters because glycogen depletion worsens the interference effect at the molecular level. Now, there have been some chats in our Facebook group about a recent study showing a few differences with glycogen depletion that make it seem like less of an issue than it is. But in reality, and working with clients, the energy, the recovery, the ability to build muscle, the ability to fuel up, the ability to hit long sessions, to last through your sessions, you know, all of that seems to be highly sensitive to carbohydrates for most people, such that having a lot of carbs to support your training sessions is really helpful, including your cardio training sessions. And in fact, the study I'm talking about in our Facebook group didn't actually fuel the athletes with very many carbs during the training session like you normally would. So that was one of the problems I had with the study. But you know what? Practical experience proves this out time and time again. Unless you're avoiding carbs for some legitimate reason, like you can't eat certain foods or you have intolerances or they just don't have helped you at all. Um, there's no reason to avoid them. The only other time you would eat low carb would probably be during a fat loss phase when you simply don't have as many calories to play with. So I would target quite a, you know, plenty of carbs. Like, like don't go low carb and don't go keto just for the sake of it. There's definitely no other benefits to it. If you enjoy it or whatever, that's fine. But carbs tend to be your friend in these cases for all the glycolytic activity, for the strength training, for the cardio, all of it. And eating before you train is helpful, eating after you train is helpful. You've got to experiment with it, though, to see what really helps you. And then total calories, really, it's this is the same for anybody. The risk, I think, with people doing concurrent training is you may be burning a lot more calories. You actually may have a higher expenditure, which is another reason to consider a hybrid or concurrent training mode. And it's not so much different than when we say, hey, lift weights, walk, and then add in some cardio if you need to burn some more calories. That's still a legitimate strategy. The last thing is, you know, supplement or not last, two more things. I have I have a supplement and then one more thing. So creatine, I'm just gonna mention it. Occasionally I mention it. I think creatine is great for everybody. There's a few people that don't respond to it. There's a tiny percentage of people that are allergic to it, but it's very tiny. And it's it's great because it enhances, you know, ATP, a density, adenosine triphosphate, an energy source for your cells. It enhances the resynthesis of ATP during high-intensity efforts, which, if you're doing medium to high intensity cardio or if you're doing heavy strength training, they both kind of are similar from that respect. And then it supports resynthesis of glycogen when you're taking it with carbohydrates. This is why, again, I think having carbs is helpful for most people. It ends up, and so you can enhance some of this with creatine. And there you go. Okay, and the last thing I want to mention here is sleep. Of course, you've got to get a lot of sleep. Although people doing a lot of cardio tend to need even more sleep. Let's just be honest. Like athletes, you think about it, you need like nine hours sometimes, you know, eight, nine. You shouldn't be a six hour sleeper and try to do all this necessarily. I guess the the exception would be if if you just if you just are perfectly fine at that level and you're not in a fat loss phase and you're eating plenty of food, like there could be a tiny case for certain people to be able to get away with this. But generally, you know, more sleep the better, more high quality sleep the better. If not, you can fit in some naps, potentially things like that. All right. I want to tell you really quickly what I'm not claiming here because the nuance always gets lost. And this is by the way, where the YouTubers never make it to this part of the episode. So most of the time when I comment on a YouTube comment, it's hey, I it looks like you didn't read the it looks like you didn't listen to the episode, did you? Like I don't even answer their question or their comment because it obviously they didn't listen to the episode. So I'm not saying, this is what I'm not saying. I'm not saying cardio has no impact on strength. It can definitely impact strength, especially if you're doing high volume, high intensity endurance work, especially in the same session as you're lifting, especially without adequate recovery. And a lot of you are doing all the group classes, all the spin classes, you're doing a lot of cardio beyond what I'm talking about. I am not saying that you can train like a marathoner and a power lifter at the same time and maximize both. There are trade-offs. We have had folks on the show who put in a lot of miles running and they maintain their strength. Maybe they slightly build their strength, but they're not going after massive all-time PRs until they dial back on the endurance side of things. If you're trying to run a fast race and you're trying to also PR your deadlift, then something's probably gonna give and you're not gonna get there unless you're a total beginner and those numbers are kind of low. You know, like the performance standard hasn't really been set very high yet. Now, I'm not saying that you can ignore nutrition and recovery and just train smarter. I'm not saying that either, right? The programming rules only work when you have a foundation of enough protein and carbs and sleep and all these things. And I'm not saying that you should add more training to an already packed schedule. So when you listen to wits and weights, don't think I'm telling you to do more, more, more. All right. If you're doing six days of endurance work and you want to add four days of lifting, that's 10 sessions a week. Okay. If you even have a job, a normal job, even if it's working just the bare minimum of 40 hours, and I say that because so many people are working beyond that, and you have your family and you take, you have your finances, you have all this stuff, that is a recipe for burnout. You might need to trade some endurance volume for some strength training volume, not stack things on top. You've got to make the trade-offs. But what I am saying is that, oh, by the way, if you're retired, I guess you're the one category for those of you over 60 who may be able to have some more of this in there. If you concurrently do both endurance and strength training, or you want to, and you've been worried that one is canceling out the other, the science says you're probably fine. Just separate your sessions, prioritize lifting when you're fresh, eat enough food, protein, carbs, sleep enough, and your body can adapt to both simultaneously. Believe it or not. It is more of a fatigue, recovery, and programming problem, not a biological limitation. Before I let you go, I promised you a 10-second morning recovery check. I'm gonna share it in just a second, but this entire episode happened because two listeners, Richard and Gerwin, sent me their questions. If there's something you want me to cover on the show, if you want me to give you a shout out, go to witzawaits.com slash question. And there's a very high chance that will become an episode, and there's a 100% chance that I will reply regardless. All right, if you want to know if your body is ready for a hard session, or should you swap in an easy day? Here's a check that takes 10 seconds. When you wake up before you get out of bed, ask yourself three questions. One, did I sleep through the night or was it a very broken sleep? Two, when I think about today's training, do I feel motivated or am I dreading it? Three, do I feel physically rested or does my body feel heavy? If you answer positively on all three, you're ready to train hard, don't overthink it, just go do it. If one of these are off, proceed, but be open to a tiny bit of flexibility. And by that I mean some auto-regulation in your training. I don't mean skip your training. I don't mean cut out half the exercises. I just mean be ready as you're warming up to be smart about it. If two or three of these questions are off, then seriously consider what you did the night before. I'm kind of joking. I'm kind of joking. But this is just a recovery check from a biofeedback perspective. It doesn't mean you don't do the hard things. It doesn't mean you don't try to go to the gym and get your training in. It just means you can be aware how that connects to how you might feel in the training or how you're auto-regulating or why your legs feel sluggish or why you're not able to get that last rep. Not meant to be used as an excuse, as an excuse. This is so that you know the link between your intensity and your daily readiness. And don't keep things so rigid that you, for example, hurt yourself, or so rigid that you give up because of this information. All right. And you don't even need a wearable, you just need those 10 seconds and those three questions that I just asked. All right. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, strength and endurance are not enemies, they are partners. And the people who figure out how to train both are the ones who stay strong, fit, and healthy for decades. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.