Ep 148: Q&A - Full-Body vs. Split Routine, Faster Recovery, and Hybrid Training (Lifting + Cardio)
Which is better, full-body training or body part splits? How can you recover faster between workouts, especially when doing a lot of high-intensity cardio? How can you balance lifting and cardio for a hybrid training approach to get the most out of both?
Philip (@witsandweights) is answering these three questions on today’s episode.
Today, you’ll learn all about:
3:46 Should I do full-body or target areas daily for lifting or strength training?
10:11 Do you have any advice to improve recovery so I can do a third workout within a week?
28:27 How do I balance resistance training and cardio?
38:50 Outro
Episode resources:
Episode summary:
Philip takes listeners through an enlightening journey to uncover the secrets of maximizing fitness gains, shedding light on the perennial debate between full-body workouts and targeted body part splits, providing insights tailored to different experience levels. For those embarking on their strength training journey, he outlines the benefits of full-body sessions, emphasizing their efficiency in promoting rapid strength gains. Conversely, Philip explains that split routines offer the volume necessary for experienced lifters to break through plateaus and continue progressing.
But what about when the weights are down and the sneakers are tucked away? Recovery, Philip stresses, is not a one-size-fits-all solution. The podcast delves into innovative recovery tactics, addressing even those with the most hectic of schedules. Philipdiscusses the importance of aligning recovery tactics with individual fitness goals and provides practical tips for maintaining fitness on the go, highlighting nutritional hacks and active recovery strategies.
The conversation shifts to a conundrum faced by many gym enthusiasts: the balance between maintaining muscle mass and improving cardiovascular health. Philip breaks down strategies that allow for this delicate balance, such as the use of adjustable dumbbells and microplates, and how to integrate cardio into your regimen without compromising muscle gains. The episode explores the nuances of workout alignment with personal aspirations, be it muscle building, fat loss, or marathon preparation.
Philip also answers questions from the fitness community, emphasizing personalized training plans that align with individual goals and recovery needs. He offers insights on proper nutrition, sufficient protein intake, the impact of fat loss phases on recovery, and the importance of hydration and sleep. He provides actionable advice for truck drivers with limited options, recommending portable high-protein snacks and strategies for improving sleep in challenging conditions.
Listeners learn about the versatility of strength training with adjustable dumbbells, particularly for those with limited gym access, and the importance of technique in maximizing muscle and strength gains. Philip also touches on the importance of varying workout intensities to aid muscle recovery and overall well-being.
In summary, this episode of Whits and Weights presents a comprehensive guide for anyone looking to refine their fitness regimen for optimal results. Philip’s expert advice, combined with practical strategies and personalized insights, offers listeners the tools to revolutionize their training regime and unlock their best bodies through custom workout strategies.
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Transcript
Philip Pape 00:00
Which is better full body training or body part splits? How can you recover faster between workouts? Especially when doing a lot of high intensity cardio? How can you balance lifting and cardio for a hybrid training approach? To get the most out of both? I'm answering these three questions on today's episode.
Philip Pape 00:20
Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast. I'm your host, Philip pape, and this twice a week podcast is dedicated to helping you achieve physical self mastery by getting stronger. Optimizing your nutrition and upgrading your body composition will uncover science backed strategies for movement, metabolism, muscle and mindset with a skeptical eye on the fitness industry. So you can look and feel your absolute best. Let's dive right in Wits & Weights community Welcome to another solo episode of the Wits & Weights podcast. In our last episode 147 A brand new way to workout at home with Josh York, you learn about a company called gym guys, and it's unique in home training model, you'll learn about Josh's intense personal workout and health regimen and how he balances everything. His views on the fitness industry and some practical strategies for training, building muscle and optimizing your fitness. Today for episode 148. We are answering three questions in a q&a questions from the community about training, splits, recovery, and balancing lifting and cardio. And I pulled them together from three different sources, one from Instagram, one from a voice message on our families page and one from Facebook. Now it's been a while since we did a q&a, mainly because we do them all the time in the Wits & Weights Facebook group with our weekly ask Phillip thread. So I wanted to take a quick moment of course and mentioned that yes, we do have a Facebook community that's totally free. Where we do a weekly live q&a. We do free live workshops, lifting form checks, you can post questions and get very positive supportive answers at all times. Just click the link in the show notes to join the Wits & Weights Facebook group and check us out see what it's all about. We'd love to have you. Now before we get to the q&a, I did want to share a couple of fresh five star reviews from Apple so that you can hear directly from listeners. These are very short. The first one is from neuron Tillman. Thanks for leading with value. I love the fact that you give so much valuable information, your transparency is refreshing. Thanks for being so passionate. And he was talking about transparency in the context of the episode I did with the five foolproof strategies for hitting your macros. And one of those I suggested that you use AI tools to give you a meal plan, even though I'm a nutrition coach, and I think that's what he was talking about. Now the second review from T dawg 117, I needed this inspiration. It's a new year. And I'm always looking for more advice on what to do in the gym, and how to be healthier. This podcast does exactly that. I'm so glad I found this. And I will be following from now on. Thank you. Thank you very much for the follow. And by the way, anyone who's listening right now, if you do love this show, the best thing you can do for me is follow the show by following me and click the Follow or subscribe button in Apple, it's called follow. And that will ensure that you get future episodes you get notified. It also though, helps the algorithm the ranking algorithm so that people can find the show is based not just on downloads, but also follows. So that would be very helpful. If you liked the show already. And you'd like to listen to it. Go ahead and click follow. Alright, now let's get to those three questions again, one from Instagram. That's the first one. You can send me a message or a question anytime on Instagram at Wits & Weights. I love to chat with folks and just audio messages, video of text, whatever. All right, this is from AP Cal, MCIL requestion. Lifting better to do full body or target areas each day. All right, she's asking the age old question of should I do three full body sessions each week that involve upper and lower movements in every session and tend to be on the longer side? Or should I split those into body parts or upper lower or push pull leg splits across four, five or even six days a week in a split routine? So let's just break it down at a very high level. What are the differences? full body workouts you have? You're doing upper and lower body movements every session now they may be the same movements are very similar. Like you may like in starting strength where you're squatting every session, you're doing a presser benchpress and you're doing a deadlift. And so this gives you frequency. This gives you significant frequency. You're going three times a week and doing the same movements rather than say once a week on a typical split or maybe twice indirectly. And for a new lifter even an early intermediate. This is fantastic for making progress because you can increase the weight on the bar each session and just push push push and make significant and serious strength gains. very quickly. The other thing is it's it's time efficient in the sense that it's fewer days per week even, even though the sessions might be a little bit longer. So if you're commuting to the gym, and you're trying to just get a lot done for your time, and you're using big compound lifts, it's very time efficient. Now, split routines where you're doing four or five, or even six days a week, you get more volume during the week, this is often needed when you're an elite, intermediate or advanced trainee, because you can no longer progress. If you you know, if you went three days a week, you would just kill yourself, you wouldn't be able to recover, you wouldn't be able to progress. So we, we split it up where you say you're only squatting one of those four days, but then you might be dead lifting or doing other leg movements, another of those four days. So you get more volume, over four or five or six days, because the sessions are a little bit shorter, but now you're doing more sessions. And you could still have frequency with indirect targeting of muscle groups, right? Like you can, you can bench press one day, and close grip bench press a different day where you're focused on triceps, both cases, you're also hitting the chest. So the recovery is also an issue here. Because, yeah, the frequency may be less, but you also need that extra recovery, because you can't advance as quickly as a beginner, right, especially for things like low back recovery and things like that. Now, given your experience, you might already have a good sense of what works for your body in terms of volume and recovery. But we did have a follow up conversation and you mentioned that you're self taught, and I could sense a little bit of a lack of confidence of has what you've been doing, then the best thing for you. So either you already have solid form and technique, or even green some bad habits over the years that need to be unlearned. Either way, here's my recommendation, try a simple Full Body program, something like starting strength, which I talked about how to pick a program way back in the archives in episode two, episode two, and I go back and listen to those early episodes. And I cringe because I like, you know, I feel like I've grown a lot since then as a communicator, however, the content is still solid, I still stand by it. And I think you'll learn a lot about my thinking of the very basics here of what you can incorporate as a beginner. And even if you've been training for 1015 years, and you have so so called bad habits, you may still be a beginner when it comes to proper progressive overload and strength training. So try a three day program like starting strength where you squat press, or bench and deadlift, every session, focus on improving that form, but also making some serious strength gains before you switch to a split. Then when you're ready for a split, I like something like a classic four day upper lower split for most intermediate lifters where, for example, very simple bench on Monday, squat on Tuesday, press on Thursday, deadlift on Friday, and then you have like three or four movements after those big lifts that include, you know, some of the less stressful compound lifts like RDLs, for example, or incline dumbbell presses and so on. And then maybe some isolation work, you know, if you're working on your biceps or shoulders, lateral raises, calf raises, things like that. And then after that the sky's the limit in terms of what options are available to you from pure bro splits, which I talked about with Andy Baker recently in the podcast. So go search that you can go to wits & weights.com/podcast, and search for any past episode with a search box there and find the topic, but look for Andy Baker. And we talked all about bro splits. You could do push pull legs, you could do there are even three days per week programs that are kind of like full body programs. But for more advanced lifters where you're doing like a heavy light medium, instead of going all out every session. And then there are even high frequency programs, which I'm not a big fan of. But for some people they work. Women tend to recover better than men, it might work for you, and so on. As always, as I'm going to say on the show many times. It depends on your goals, your lifestyle, how your body responds. And you know, have fun with it. Like experiment. Life is a journey you have many years to try these things out. The principles are always the same progressive overload, right? Training, hard training, close to failure, having a managing stimulus versus recovery and fatigue. And eventually you're going to cycle through different programs, you might spend anywhere from like 12 weeks to many months, or even a year or more running the same program before you switch it up, depending on how well it's designed. So again, if you haven't gone back far in the archives if you haven't like been a binge listener, go back to episode two attitudes a strength training program. And if you're listening to my podcast and you haven't heard that, or many of the old episodes, definitely go check all those out the very first like 10 episodes were these foundational education series that I put together, which I'd love to revisit at some time to be honest, but they're still pretty solid. And then after that there's a Many, many episodes on these topics. Always reach out to me if you want on IG since we're already connected there, or go use the Wits & Weights comm slash podcast, podcast finder. Okay. Question number two is from the fan list page we have, okay. And this is, if you got a fan list.com/wits & weights, you can submit a voice message. Yeah, it's like old school, you know, call in radio show. And so our second question is from James Carr. And I'm gonna play that for you live on the show right now.
10:32
Hello, my name is James Carr. And I'm a big fan of your podcasts. I love the information that you have. I listen every week, multiple times through the week. So I really appreciate what you put out there on the podcast, and over the road truck driver. 54 will be 65 years old. In February. My question is about recovery. At work out. I'm not new to working out. However, I have deconditioned over the last probably 1012 years. I've just started working out again in about six months ago. I've seen some gains. But my question is, my recovery is so slow, that it's hard for me to get more than two workouts in during the week. And I do a hit style workout. I have dumbbells I gotta eat like barbells. But I'll have at all I have access to this set of adjustable dumbbells and do calisthenics mixed in with some dumbbell work. And I do a certain hit style circuit workout. Play sweet. Daily, it takes me three, sometimes four days in between workouts to get in my next workout. You have any advice, any tips for me to improve my recovery so that I could possibly get a third workout and during the week? Again, I thank you so much for all that you do all your information. All and hope to hear your response. Thank you so much. Have a great day.
Philip Pape 12:21
All right, James, Thanks for leaving a voice message. It's really It's always great to hear directly from dedicated listeners like you, especially in your own voice. It's so cool. So as your question. First of all, I'm, I'm always going to route for someone like you who is committed to working out despite the challenges of being on the road with that kind of lifestyle as a truck driver, the schedule you have, you know, I imagine there's just a lot that interferes with having a typical, you know, routine, both on the nutrition and training side. And here's what I'm going to do for you. Okay, I'm going to answer two questions, I'm going to answer the direct one that you asked. And then I'm going to answer the one that I think you need to hear. Because I bet there are a lot of folks listening or watching who face a similar dilemma of managing recovery. And it's it affects everyone, but especially affects it affects us as we age, right? Those of us over 40 5060, whether you've been doing it a long time or not. There are limitations in a recovery just from the aging process. It's not an excuse, and there's ways to work around it. But we have to be cognizant of that when we think of what our bodies are capable of, and what stress load or capacity they have. And as well as what goal you're going for. So first, the actual question you asked the literal question is about improving recovery, and being able to train a third time each week because you train twice right now. And we're going to talk about your mode of training, which is focused on calisthenics and cardio. So it's effectively an endurance based style training. I know you're using dumbbells, and I realized that that is some level of resistance and load. You didn't however, mention specific program or plan of progression on those. So I'm going to assume they're more you said circuit based. So that's more like a p90x type of deal, which really is endurance, it's good for conditioning, and a little bit of initial strength build, but then it kind of plateaus quickly on the strength side, and it becomes mainly a form of just movement of activity. Okay. And you could already hear in the way that I'm framing this part of the question, where I'm gonna go with a second question and answer that you need to hear, but I'm not there yet. So the issue of recovery, slowing down is pretty common as we age as I mentioned, especially when we're de trained, you said you were getting back into it. So that implies that some lack of conditioning, you're deconditioned. And then these things are compounded by, by age, by the inconsistent schedule by the lack of routine. I'm not saying you don't have a routine, but I'm saying your lifestyle and your job may make that difficult, right? And all these sorts of life factors, sleep and so on. You might be doing too much too soon and just you gotten ahead of your ability to recover. And or you might not be engaging in the behaviors between your workouts needed to recover, right? A lot of what we do has nothing to do with the workout itself so much as what we're doing in between those workouts, which is what I get the sense for what you are asking. So let's start with nutrition, always, are you getting enough protein for for that muscle repair for holding on to that muscle? Again, even if we're not talking about strength training, per se, you know, we all need protein. And the older you get, the more you need, aiming for that, you know, point seven to one gram per pound of body weight. And are you getting enough carbs for energy and recovery, when you do a lot of what we call glycolytic activity, right, where glycogen is a primary source of fuel, like the cardio style that you're doing the hit style, carbs can be extremely beneficial. Before and after your workout, kind of around the workout, you can play with it. So don't be training fasted is when I'm going out with that. And then as a truck driver, you might have limited food options. So definitely get creative with portable, high protein snacks. I don't know if you have a refrigerator or ways to keep things cold in a cooler, because I always go to like Greek yogurt and cottage cheese. But then there's things like nuts and protein bars, protein shakes, jerky, all that kind of stuff. Also, are you eating enough? Overall, I should have asked that to begin with, are you even eating enough calories total, because if you're trying to, if you're in a fat loss phase, which you didn't specify, that's going to have a big impact on your recovery as well. And at least with my clients when we're in a fat loss phase, we're also strength training and we try to keep the cardio pretty reasonably low, it's mostly walking with maybe a little bit of medium intensity, maybe hit session thrown in but not much at all, because the priority is the lifting and holding on to the muscle. So if you're dieting right now, that could that will definitely have a big impact. And so just maybe spend some time in maintenance, recovering all of that and seeing if that helps you get that third session in hydration, or you hydrated, right? Again, being a truck driver, I don't know what you have access to if you're drinking a lot of caffeine or diuretics. But staying hydrated mineralizing your water with electrolytes, something as simple as salt and lemon juice, or you can get convenient powders that can go in there. Right. So hydration. Sleep is vital for all of this. I mean, honestly, I should have said that number one. Besides nutrition sleep is the most important thing when it comes to recovery. Getting enough quantity of sleep quality of sleep. If you have to sleep on your truck, man, I don't know what the situation is. But I'm gonna go for quiet. Cool, you know where sleep mask put stuff in your ears. There's even this cool mask I just started using called URENCO. It's like an electronic eyeball massager, eat an eyeball massager you can use earlier in the day to kind of call me down. So having a quiet sleep environment where there's absolutely no light coming in, is going to be vital. And then having enough sleep, of course, or fit in naps when you can. There's also the idea of active recovery, right? If your primary mode is cardio and endurance, then you really don't want to be doing that same thing on your rest days. So are you just taking it easy and just walking. And by taking it easy, I mean, you still want to walk and move and kind of stretch out especially if you're sitting in a car all day, and get that you know, 810 1000 Steps ish to stay recovered between your sessions. But you also don't want to compound your stress with more cardio. And so we're thinking of like your blood flow, we're thinking of your muscle recovery, we're thinking over digestion, all these things that are aided your gut health and so on, aided by just taking it easy, but but getting the steps in the workout intensity comes to mind as well. Okay, I don't know how your two day sessions look. But maybe they need to be different in the sense that one is like super high intensity one is more moderate. Right? It's kind of like the high intensity pushes the moderate maintains but allows recovery, we do the same thing with strength training with a like a high, medium, low, Heavy, Medium light structure with training where you go, you know, super high intensity, then you go medium, or then you go light, then you go medium, I'm kind of fumbling on my words, but you get the idea. The idea is, rather than put go all out on every session, which could sort of get ahead of your ability to recover, you go all out on one session, and then you dial it back for the second so that you can recover but maintain and then you're able to go out for a third session of maybe somewhere in between, right or maybe it's one high two mediums, something like that, or a high medium and even like a take it easy session where you're you're at least working out, but it's nowhere near the intensity of the other ones. Runners, for example, you know, can really beat themselves up if they're always going after distance or they're always going after speed. And so playing with the training variables, and then working in different cardio zones, you know, split up some zone twos versus the zone four or five with a hit can maybe benefit your recovery. post workout recovery when it's when you're talking cardio. I don't know if you particularly have any particular areas or spots that were used to be injured or you had surgery where you need to massage foam or or, you know, use a lacrosse ball, things like that. You know, I generally like for lifters, I don't worry about that too much unless they have very special circumstances. But those things can help recovery when you kind of warm up or massage out part of your body that you've just used a lot for that session. And then of course, listen to your body. Like if you need the three to four days of recovery. Your body is telling you that it needs that time, right? And so you don't want to get overtrained. You don't want to get injured. And I should have asked us at the beginning, but why do you need to work out a third time? Is it mental health, like if there's a reason you want to work out that has nothing to do with making some sort of gain or progress, there might be an alternative is where I'm going. Hey, this is Philip. And I hope you're enjoying this episode of Wits & Weights, I started Wits & Weights to help people who want to build muscle lose fat and actually look like they lift. I've noticed that when people improve their strength and physique, they not only look and feel better, they transform other areas of their life, their health, their mental resilience and their confidence in everything they do. And since you're listening to this podcast, I assume you want the same things the same success, whether you recently started lifting, or you've been at this for a while and want to optimize and reach a new level of success. Either way, my one on one coaching focused on engineering your physique and body composition is for you. If you want expert guidance and want to get results faster, easier, and with fewer frustrations along the way to actually look like you lift, go to wits & weights.com, and click on coaching, or use the link in my show notes to apply today. I'll ask you a few short questions to decide if we're a good fit. If we are, we'll get you started this week. Now back to the show.
Philip Pape 21:46
Now, here's the thing, I'm gonna give you the answer that I think you need to hear. Because based on what you shared about your current training, and the goals you're aiming for, which I think you mentioned gains in your audio message, right. And you listen to this show. So I assume, James that you want to get stronger. You want to build muscle you want improve your health, you want to prove your body composition, even your physique. And I'd strongly suggest moving away from calisthenics and circuit style training, to traditional strength training. Because I think that more than anything than anything I just told you, which are just kind of band aids on on the fact that you're already just doing hit style training, strength training more than anything will unlock the gains that I think you want and improve your recovery time. And they will still support your work capacity and your cardiovascular health. All right, and here's why. So let's talk about the very big principle underlying all of this muscle growth based on progressive overload. If you want hypertrophy, if you want gains, if you want to get stronger, you want to build muscle, you've got to have progressive overload, right? It's very straightforward with free weights. Now, if you don't have access to barbells, I get it. Dumbbells can still do the job as long as they can go up heavy enough. And if you're, you know, a typically strong guy with your truck driver, and you probably bigger guy, I don't know I'm making an assumption, maybe you're not doesn't matter. A male, there's a female, you probably need dumbbells or adjustable dumbbells that go up to 90 pounds, not just the 52 pound ones. So those aren't going to take you very far. So that's the kind of investment you gotta make, you got to make that choice and get those heavier dumbbells, right. And that'll give you a lot of runway to build some of that strength. You should also have some microplates, to put on those dumbbells so that you can progress in smaller increments where needed. And go ahead and just run a straight forward, you know, sets and reps across strength training program with dumbbells, like there's a million out there, I can point you to one you can, you know, reach out to me directly, we can follow up. But you're not going to do a circuit style training, you're going to do like three or four movements, probably a squat type movement, a press type movement, a hinge type movement, you know, pull type movement. And you can do that three days a week. And you're going to progress in weight over time. And that's how you're going to get stronger. And guess what, it's going to give you more time to recover. It's gonna be way less stressful on your body than these hit style workouts. You'll still build cardiovascular health because when you're lifting heavy, your heart rate goes up. And then you can walk the rest of the time. And you can still do a hit session or two in now I'm not saying you can't. Alright. Now if you can focus on compound movements, like we talked about, you know, squats, deadlifts, presses, it's more efficient with your time, right? It's not as much volume to impede your recovery, you're still gonna make big gains. And you can still do that with the dumbbells as long as they go heavy enough, right? I mean, there's other options like bands and TRX and stuff like that, but I definitely prefer the free weights. Another thing is that when you're training with, say, dumbbells or barbells, you can adjust your training load to manage your fatigue better and make sure you're not pushing beyond what your body can recover. I feel like when it comes to hit and cardio, we get in the zone or the endorphins are firing. You know, our heart rates up we go out And then before long, we don't realize we've actually maybe gone too hard for our recovery ability. Whereas I feel like with lifting you don't, you don't hit that same limit, you can manage it much easier, and then recover faster, and workout smarter. Alright. There's also the fact that if you lift, the three days a week is going to be no problem. I think, like, if you just lift weights, right HIIT sessions could beat you down, beat you up, the lifting sessions, especially when you're getting started, you're just building that initial strength, you can recover pretty quickly, you know, even at whatever age 5060 years old, okay. And that's going to be more beneficial than the high frequency nature of circuit training. Because it's going to provide your muscles the rest that they need to grow, I feel like the circuit training just tears them up. And then you go at it the next time, and you're just sore, but you're not actually building strength and muscle. What else? Let's see, I was going to talk about technique and stuff like that. But I mean, I don't want to get too detailed down the rabbit hole here. The other thing is free weight training, you know, strength training is very versatile, right, you can adjust all these training variables, sets, reps, rest, and programming itself, to work with your truck driving schedule and your recovery capacity. And then I alluded to before that strength training will increase your work capacity naturally. And you can still throw in a few short sessions of medium or high intensity cardio, if you need to increase your conditioning further, which is fine, like some people need to do that. And for others, just adding in a few extra 1000 steps of walking makes all the difference. I didn't, I didn't see details about your step count. But like if you're just doing the cardio, and then you never walk and you just sit all day in your truck, for example. That's another piece of it that could be impeding your recovery, which I kind of addressed when I talked about recovery days. So James, my man, I hope that you will shift your focus toward traditional freeway training, if possible, because I think that's going to yield you much better results in terms of hypertrophy, but also the Recovery Management you're looking for. I've had so many clients start with me, female and male who are just doing too much, and they're doing too much cardio, and we strip it all back, we go to a three day Full Body program, kind of like what I talked about in the first question today. And all of a sudden the stress comes down, the recovery goes up, they're able to eat better sleep more on and on and on kind of compounds on itself. Now, this isn't to say that what you've been doing isn't beneficial. So I don't want to be like, No, you need to stop doing that. But I know when you ask a question like this, for this show, you're looking for a little bit of guidance a little bit, a little bit of coaching, and I'm trying to provide that because I went through a lot of this myself. I did CrossFit for eight years. I've said that many times. And yeah, my conditioning was okay, but nothing else was where I wanted it. And it wasn't until I started lifting weights with progressive overload, that I started to make progress. And so given your goals, what are your goals, a pivot could be what you need to unlock what you've been striving for him, right? Let's think about working out differently. Let's think about optimizing your sessions for the gains you're looking for, and the recovery you're looking for, rather than trying to fit another day of what you're already beating yourself up with, into your already packed schedule. All right, keep up the hustle, James, keep it up. And, you know, please check in again, I want you to check in again. And send me another message with an update on your progress. You know, a few weeks from now, like whatever it makes sense, take action, whatever it is, if it's if it's continuing to do what you're doing, but getting smarter with all the things we talked about nutrition and rest and everything, and walking, go for it. If it's strength training, go for it either way, let me know how it goes. Alright, our last question today is from Facebook. So we're covering all the bases today. And this is from Ryan P. And Ryan says, quote, lately, I've been wanting to learn more about hybrid training. For a long time I only lifted no cardio. Now I'm doing both. And I'm wondering best how to balance them, as I sometimes feel that I'm spinning my wheels trying to make serious progress in both areas simultaneously. And I responded to him on Facebook and I said, Look, this is gonna be an awesome question. And I'm looking forward to answering it. But I wanted to make sure I got this right. When you say you're trying to make serious progress in both areas, simultaneously, that that is that is what the question is centered on it is not just, hey, I want to lift and maybe throwing cardio, it sounds like he really wants to make progress in both. Now we didn't go into details beyond that. I don't know if it's, if you're a competitor and endurance athlete, you know, if it's Ironman Triathlon, that kind of thing, Spartan, you know, whatever, and then you also want to lift, but I think the the advice I'm gonna give you today, the answer I'm gonna give will still be applicable. Alright. And this is a fantastic question, because it's very common. It's a very common dilemma today, because I think a lot of lifters are looking to incorporate more cardio into their routine, but they don't want to sacrifice strength and muscle gains, right. And this idea of hybrid training or concurrent training, it's sometimes called is is about finding the right balance between resistance training and cardiovascular work, so that you have the complete package for your training. Now there are there are some myths that persist one of those is the interference effect. Now there is some truth to the interference effect, the idea that if you do a certain amount of cardio, it will interfere with your recovery and the adaptation from lifting and thus interfere with your gains. But what we've come to find over the years is that it requires a significant amount of cardio to do that. And so there's a large tolerance of cardio that we can handle just fine as lifters. And I'm going to talk about a little bit here how there are even benefits to having cardio for recovery, as a lifter, mainly in getting your cardiovascular health, your work capacity up to snuff up to a certain level. And there are I've had clients, it's very interesting, they're super muscular, they've been training many years. And, but their cardiovascular fitness isn't quite there. So it's a kind of huff and puff in some of the longer workouts, they might not be able to get all the reps. And we just and it turns out that they're only getting 3000 Subs a day, because they have a desk job. And we upped that to six or seven and all of a sudden, boom, resting heart rate comes down, you know, HRV improves, you know, their zone two is is tolerable, and on and on. And that's all it takes. Other people need a little bit more than that. Okay. The key, though, is not to overdo it. And so here's here's my thoughts for you, Ryan. All right. First, what is your primary goal? Like? And I know, I know, you've probably thought that as well. Others have told you this. But you've got to decide which aspect of fitness is more important to you, at the moment, not for your whole life. Just at the moment like by at the moment, I mean, the next three, three months, the next six months, the next year. And I like to face things I like to face Tuesday. I like to face nutrition, I like to face training, even cardio. So in your case, you want to decide what is your goal right now? Do you want to gain muscle? Do you wanna improve cardiovascular health? Do you want to achieve fat loss? Do you want to perform an endurance competition, and then this is going to dictate how you prioritize your training, right? It doesn't mean neglecting one for the other. But understanding which one takes precedent because then you can say, Okay, I've got to set everything off for success for that one thing. And then see what capacity I have left are the other things. It's like, if you have, you can't have 10 of your favorite hobbies that you're doing all the time. You know, unless you unless you don't work or something, but you can't have like, Okay, I like woodworking. And I like, you know, playing video games, and I like playing music and I liked you know, snowboarding and I like this. And this, this is, and you're not going to do all 10 of those things, like almost every day of the week, right, you're gonna pick one that you go through a phase of learning and growing at, and the others you kind of maintain, and then you switch to another one, maybe you can do two at once, but then you're not doing them optimally, you get what I'm saying. So there's a first of all, if lifting is your priority, I would just say hey, lifting is my priority. And I'm going to incorporate strategic cardio, this is what I would do for that I would have low intensity, steady state cardio, okay, this could be biking, for example. And I would do those on your non lifting days or a few hours after your strength training, it's much less likely to interfere, no matter when you do it to be honest, and it can help with blood flow and recovery and work capacity. So I'm cool with that. So two, three, maybe even four of those sessions for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, something like that. Or if you need an hour long session, you know, have fewer of them. And then high intensity interval training if you prefer that. So there's different different schools of thought on this. One school of thought is do it the same day as your lifting session, right after your lifting, but not on a leg day. So like if it's a leg based hit, do it on a non leg day. So that you're kind of doing it in between the leg days and not interfering with the leg workout on the adaptation. But you're also not interfering with overall recovery. By putting it on a rest day you're putting it on after another lifting session, or putting it sufficiently spaced out like 234 hours spaced out if you lift in the morning to hit in the evening, right? Although I don't like high intensity exercise too late in the day, because I interfere with sleep and stress, cortisol everything else. Alright, anyway. So I think I just rambled on. But basically, if you want to have one or two high intensity training sessions, I think that's fine. I think more than that is too much when your priority is lifted. Now, if you want to use periodization, what I would do is structure your training in cycles. So you might focus more on lifting with minimal cardio for a few months, then switch to pre period where the cardio is the the precedence, right. And now instead of like for lifting days and two cardio days you might have for cardio days into lifting days, and the lifting days or just for strength maintenance, you have just the amount of volume needed to maintain, which studies have shown can be as little as a fourth or a fifth, the amount of volume just to maintain your muscles. So you're not trying to make any any progress on your gains. You're just holding on to your progress. And then you're focusing on the cardio, right? So periodization is a great strategy. Nutrition, of course, you're going to have to optimize that but generally it's not going to differ too much unless We're talking about a competition like an endurance competition where you need to carb load and kind of lower the protein, increase the carbs as you get closer to the event. Other than that, keep the protein high, make sure you're eating enough calories, make sure you have carbs to to refuel your energy storage of glycogen, getting plenty of sleep, you know, keep the rest days in there. This is why I like having cardio sometimes on the same day as you're lifting but spaced apart, so that you have full rest days where all you're doing is just walking. Okay? Also monitor all the things like monitor all the things that you want to track, and then adjust. And so if you're a data nerd, like me, I would go all out with all the things that you need, based on what your priority is at that moment. So whether it's strength levels, or your, you know, your body composition, how you feel your biofeedback, if you're an endurance data nerd, you want to look at your zone, what zone, you're in your resting heart rate, your HRV, all that stuff. And then if you notice the progress stalling on the thing that you care about right now, then that's a sign that something's off, right. And then there's also experimenting with different schedules. So despite everything I just said, you said that you're struggling to do both simultaneously. I suspect you're just doing too much. And you're not focusing on one over the other, like we talked about. But you may also want to move things around. So think about your schedule, and see both Should I lift and do cardio in the morning at night, on different days, on the same days, like try different permutations of those, see how your body responds because your life schedule, your work, your family obligations, your stress, your sleep, your food schedule, all of that are going to be tightly interwoven with your training approach. So it's a lot I know. And I kind of tried to answer a bunch of stuff all in one answer. But hopefully that gives you a good idea of how to balance and gives you ideas to balance both. Long story short, prioritize one goal at a time, be strategic, it takes longer to build muscle than to build conditioning. So unless you have a competition that you're going after, I would mostly prioritize building muscle, but then periodized in periods of the conditioning, the endurance, and then when you're doing that you can maintain your muscle. So there you go. Alright, hope that answers your question. That's all we have for questions today. That was three big meaty questions from from everywhere. And if you want your question answered in an upcoming q&a, I would say the best way to do that is either not either join our Wits, & Weights, Facebook community, it'll be one of the best decisions you ever made, because it's totally free. And we do live q&a is in there. There are masterclasses tons of resources a supportive community, right? We announce things we give you early releases of podcasts, episodes, things like that. So join the free Wits & Weights community. You can however, also send me a message on IG at Wits & Weights, look for both links in the show notes. Alright, in our next episode 149 Four surprising ways to lose that midlife belly fat with Megan Dolman making those awesome. I mean, she and I had such a great talk we actually recorded on each other's shows because it just it's such good chemistry. She's, she's amazing. And I like how she treats this topic. It's a fun and you know, frustrating topic. For many of you, especially many of you women, it's the topic of belly fat, especially in women over 40. And she gives it an evidence based treatment that I very much appreciate. You know, we're going to separate fact from fiction, you're going to learn about the physiological and hormonal changes that affect belly fat, right, the visceral, more dangerous fat around your organs. Megan will share four surprising but evidence based strategies for reducing belly fat, and she's gonna give you that confidence to tackle with what's called the midlife fluffing top whether you're looking to enhance your health or physique or just better understand your body. As always, stay strong. And I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits. & Weights podcast.
Philip Pape 38:57
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