Does Cardio After Lifting Kill Your Gains?

like you have this huge workout your muscles are ready to grow they're like food and you're like you know what you guys get instead of food that's a lot like food and they're like what you're like cardio now and they're like ah they don't love that and muscles don't love something they don't tend to grow as much those stupid muscles hey folks Dr Mike here for RP strength and today's topic is about cardio and its potential interference with getting you jacked but in a specific case of doing cardio after your weight training why are we

talking about this a lot of people will do weights in the gym couple days a week train to get jacked train to get strong and then afterwards they know they're supposed to be doing some cardio or they have cardio to do as part of their fat loss plan since they're already in the gym a lot of times they're just going to like do cardio right after it's cool you get to cool down from weights get to listen to some music get to check out some curves on the other machines Scott what's your policy about staring

at people while they're doing cardio from behind when they don't you're staring at them are we cool with that is it yolo at the gym you're wearing yoga pants for a reason or is it still weird I walk around and then so they can see me staring at them I want them to know yes I want you to know that you're the apple of my eye and then you and then you I already forgot about you I'm noticing you yes hi I already feel creeped out which is good all right so in order to figure

out the answer the question of like is this a bad idea to do cardio after weights like is it causing us some kind of muscle growth problem let's take a step step by-step approach the first question we're going to ask is what is the purpose of cardio in our case here for the purpose of this video basically it's to burn fat but also to boost health or to improve cardio performance abilities for some other sport or just your own Vibe totally valid all kind of same same for cardio here now what is the purpose of

training with weights it's not just a workout these things have two different purposes cardio is fat burning and maybe health and maybe sport performance but for weights the purpose for our stuff here is is to stimulate the muscles uh to grow or to stimulate the body to get stronger body being muscles and the nervous system and so on and so forth so size or strength but notice it didn't say to make them grow just to stimulate them to grow because the weight training workout actually doesn't result in any muscle gain whatsoever I wish you could

just gain muscle in the gym I would never leave the gym the reality is you gain muscle in the days after training in which you eat and sleep and rest and relax that's when muscle growth happens but in order to stimulate that growth to trigger that growth to get that growth to begin that's what weight training does and after weight training the body can enter a certain kind of state which optimizes the probability that it'll enter into this growth State at the highest possible level but there are other things we can do to the body

after training maybe one of them is cardio that may or may not interfere with that Cascade process in the muscle cells that says hey let's get the growth process started so let's ask another question what are the body States during rest after weights versus if we do cardio after weight so if we're resting after weights like you finish lifting you go to the locker room take pictures of your genitals take pictures of other people's genitals against their inform consent you go to the parking lot you start drinking your protein and carb shake you sit in

your car to warm it up while scrolling through your pictures and sending them to your friends classic stuff everyone does with the gym and what is your body uh doing what a processes is undergoing if you just do that and you don't do any crazy physical activity or any cardio right after you lift a couple of things first you have what's called parasympathetic nervous system dominance your nervous system the autonomic nervous system has kind of two main modes the sympathetic nervous system is fight or flight that's the one that you feel when the crush of

your dreams walks by and your heart starts pounding you urinate yourself as you usually do that sort of thing the other part is the parasympathetic type of activation which is the relaxation and Recovery part and parasympathetic after lifting parasympathetic nervous system dominance is what you get and that is absolutely what you want in addition to that blood flow continues to occur throughout the whole body but it is biased to some substantial extent to recently trained muscles so if you train your legs you'll notice that if you sit in your car for a bit afterwards and

nice and warm you drive home home after a 20-minute drive home you get out of your car and you instantly like take off all your clothes in the street there's children playing you don't care you're a Savage you're going to notice that your vascularity is much more intense than usual in your legs because after workout your heart will pump uh blood all over but the vessels in your muscles you just trained are more dilated which promotes more blood flow it removes metabolites it starts to get the growth processes going all really really good stuff in

addition to that once uh especially if you eat after training um but even if you don't eat after training once the training stimulus wears down and you're relaxed there's more blood flow from the GI tract to recently trained muscles there's more blood flow to recently trained muscles because of their dilation effect but especially if you have a protein shake or eat your post-workout meal your GI track starts to really pump out a lot of blood or there's a lot of blood pump to your GI tract that blood picks up the nutrients that you're digesting and

transports them everywhere but because your muscles that you just trained have more blood flow going to them than normal you get more nutrients to them than normal which is really really good for very obvious reasons in addition to that there is no added local muscle catabolic system activity or activation mtor is a pathway or Central regulator in the muscle cell that causes a lot of muscle growth to occur if it gets activated and it's activated by the presence of uh various hormones myostatin it's activated by resistance training duh that's what grows most of your muscle

for you and there's other Pathways one of them is called amp kinas ampk and ampk is kind of the catabolic regulator it's activated by insufficient food high stress conditions sympathetic nervous system activity and by continual activity at low grade endurance levels of that muscle but if you go rest that muscle you don't get much activity andk in the local muscle and that means you're not interfering with growth which is a really really good thing because you're not active in that local muscle there is no more fatigue being generated that local muscle fatigue is an excellent

stimulus of gains in some cases locally at the muscular level but fatigue after a certain point when your muscle's already well trained is extra and it's no good and it kind of interferes with that growth Cascade so as soon as you're done training your muscle and you rest it then it's really good that there's no more local fatigue summary and lastly there's no more depletion of glycogen in that muscle that you just trained glycogen is the internal storage of carbohydrate in your muscles and if your glycogen levels are very high it actually uh Works to

unlock your ability to grow that muscle more if your glycogen levels are very low very depleted the probability that muscle growth Machinery will activate as much in that muscle is uh quite substantially reduced so you're not depleting any more glycogen when you're not active anymore so for all of these reasons resting a muscle for at least a few hours after you've trained it hard and rest can even involve like some light walking or something like that it doesn't mean just sit there but even if you just sit there it's probably pretty damn good for a

bunch of these reasons to get that muscle growth stimulus really turned into actual muscle growth Machinery activation which will stay active for a few days and get you Mega jacked now that's what happens if you rest after you do weights what happens if you do cardio instead first you can get more activity in the sympathetic nervous system than you otherwise would which is fight or flight that scales with intensity if you do really easy cardio you can actually have no sympathetic nervous system involvement at all if it's a really gentle walk you can actually get

further reductions and actually more parasympathetic activity with a light walk sometimes than even total rest on some conditions but if you're doing some uh incline walking that's pretty tough you're doing the step mill you're doing the bicycle ergometer or anything that starts get your heart rate much over 120 140 plus beats per minute the higher your heart rate goes and the tougher the cardio is the more sympathetic nervous system activity occurs and that is not ideal for muscle growth promotion you do get more blood flow to the muscles that are performing cardio so if you

just trained legs and you do cardio with your legs you walk there will be more blood flow through your legs which is by itself not a terrible thing however if you just train chest and then you go for a jog because there's only so much blood in your body and because your legs are not taking up a lot more blood circulation almost by definition you're going to get a little bit less at least blood circulating from your heart to your chest and back and remember blood flow to the muscles we just trained is generally a

good thing especially if it comes in with nutrients and so that's a bit of a downside right away in addition to that there's one really Dependable thing with cardio especially more intense cardio as it scales up is that the amount of blood flow to and from the GI tract substantially declines so hard cardio after lifting means there's just not a lot of blood flow going on between the G tract and the muscles you just lifted for and so the feeding of them with nutrients and the promotion of those growth processes is going to be to

some extent reduced of course anytime you activate a muscle and move it around ampk is active but especially if you do it repetitively in a lowgrade state ampk is activated by cardio reliably so if you're doing cardio after training you get more ampk activation in the local muscle it's not a system thing so if you just train bicep but you're doing cardio walking up an incline pretty fast yeah your biceps will be totally fine in that regard but your quads after a quad session if you go walking they're going to have higher mpk activity which

directly suppresses mtor activity which actually starts to trigger muscle growth so you get less muscle growth triggering which is not ideal in addition to that especially with harder cardio you get local muscle fatigue generation after you've just trained your calves and you start jogging you continue to fatigue your calves and after just training them for hypertrophy the ideal situation is to not fatigue them anymore to get them to rest and recover and replete and grow but now you're fatiguing them more which is not ideal and of course we already talked about glycogen the lower your

glycogen the worse it is for getting that growth process started if you continue to deplete your glycogen it's an opportunity missed for putting more glycogen back in there so further glycogen depletion for muscles you just trained at the local level is not ideal and that's what happens when you do cardio and deplete the muscles now again if you did triceps but you're doing um you know some kind of incline walking you're not depleting glycogen from your triceps these are only local things but as you'll see in a minute that means that especially after you train

legs maybe hard cardio isn't the best thing you could do so to sum all of this up how do these State differences affect growth and really the nearly ideal state after training for muscle growth and almost certainly strength development as well is kind of the opposite of all of the states that cardio promotes especially if you delay your post-workout meal or your post-workout shake and then it's doubly bad because then the GI tra circulation doesn't even get going so what do I mean by that if you have to do 30 minutes of incline walking cardio

and you just trained upper body you can do that cardio and sip on a protein carb Shake combo and at least you get Matt going which is good but if you're doing like hard Sprint intervals or jogging or really crazy elliptical and you do that for 45 minutes after your weights work out that's an extra 45 minutes that your biceps that you just trained are like hey so like what what when are we getting like when are we getting fed and your body's like shut up and suffer like a mini um David goggin pops out

in your B in your biceps and punches them in the face they're crying their glasses are broken they can't even find their glasses that's the situation you're leaving a biceps in starved for nutrients not not starved in the capital S your biceps aren't going to die they're not going to never grow again but definitely not ideal so if instead of probably sitting down or just chilling out and vibing and walking around slow and bbing and having a meal If instead of that you're doing hard cardio and not a meal you're definitely leaving some potential gains

on the table RP hypertrophy app comes with dozens of pre-made programs from 2 days of training per week all the way up to 6 days of training with specialized programs included for shoulders arms chest back legs abs and glutes each one with male and female options you get them all and can use them as often as you like even building off of them to make your own customized versions for only about a dollar a day click on the link in the description of this video to get started so from all of these scenarios what is

the biggest deal that's going to cost us the most potential muscle growth and how big of a deal isn't a couple of things the higher intensity your cardio the worse so if you're gasping for air after 30 minutes of card cardio like that will not promote muscle growth as much as it could cardio that uses the muscles you just trained is especially bad so if you want to do some walking after an upper body workout it's not a big deal but if you just did an upper body workout and you're cranking the elliptical really hard

with upper body that's not ideal and of course after pretty much all of leg training going Doing Hard cardio that involves your legs is definitely not ideal there's a duration component so cardio that takes longer than 30 minutes to do is going cost you more potential gains than cardio that's shorter so if you have to do a 20 20 minutes of incline walking after even a leg workout it just not that big of a deal but if you have to do an hour of incline walking after leg workout yeah it's going to cost you something

that might be notable in your results and cardio that has a post-workout shake that you drink during it is going to be probably a little bit better for promoting growth than cardio that has just you just aren't eating instead you're doing cardio like you have this huge workout your muscles are rated grow they're like food and you're like you know what you guys get instead of food that's a lot like food and they're like what you're like cardio now and they're like ah they don't love that and muscles don't love something they don't tend to

grow as much those stupid muscles now here's the thing none of this is some shit that in almost any circumstance is going to cause you to lose muscle none of this in almost every circumstance is some shit that's going to cause you to not make any gains from that workout but if you push these variables you do very hard cardio definitely don't take a workout shake with it and you do like an hour or something at the end of each workout you can mute the degree to which your muscle gains will occur by as much

as 50% in some cases so if you normally would have grown like I don't know 50 gram of muscle from a single given workout then you might only be growing 25 grams of muscle why is this important because it's something you should know so that you're comfortable with the trade-offs if you're a person that loves cardiovascular fitness loves being jacked but isn't like so obsessed with being jacked they're willing to toss their cardio out the side and you have a busy Balanced Life you're career person you go to school you go see people on dates

and other people show up to the date they don't let you down like always and no one ever shows up your Tinder profile actually giv people look at it what whatever normal people do normal people like you then you might be like look I love my 45 minute weight workouts and I always do 45 minutes of cardio I only train 5 days a week it's an hour and a half it really unwinds me for the evening that's what I'm going to do and I okay with making slower gains but still make gains Hey listen God

bless you but if your person that's trying to optimize for hypertrophy and you didn't know that doing hard long duration cardio without eating after training especially for your legs is like you're doing all this optimizing you're lengthened partial is you're doing full range of motion you're doing these like complex set and rep schemes periodization us the RP hypertrophy app and all of a sudden you know you're like you're going out to you know with friends out to eat you're you're like thinking about your Macros a little bit kind of trying to order healthy and waking

up you know like you know four or five times um you know per day you're you're eating you wake up in the morning to make sure you get your protein in and all of a sudden someone's like did you know that all that cardio you're doing after your weights takes half of your gains and just goes we're not going to be doing that right now oh man like I feel kind of weird about that you know it's kind of like dating someone for a while and you're like where good right and they're like oh this

has been super casual to me the entire time I've actually been like thinking about when to tell you I'm done you're like but but the but the I got you flowers that had my own literal blood on them those never arrived did they Scott you think if she got the flowers with my blood on them she would be married to me now or I would be in jail yeah it's good they didn't arrive they do actually do marriages in prison technically right really uh a conjugal visit is that what that means conjugal marriage I wonder

where those flowers are some old lady's like Jesus Christ in any case just knowing that it can really hamper your gains but it doesn't make you smaller and you still get gains is a thing you should know now if you're like dude fuck all of that I still need to do my cardio after training but I want to do it in such a way that it doesn't cost me a ton I have recommendations at first low intensity cardio doesn't hamper your nearly as much so ease up in the jogging do incline walking instead and you're

already halfway there to costing yourself fewer gains cardio that uses other muscles than the just trained ones so if you have like uh two leg sessions and two upper body sessions a week and you also have two extra cardio sessions a week put your cardio and make it incline walking or whatever you know jogging or whatever you do for cardio that's only lower body put it after those upper body workouts so that after your leg workout you're not using those just trained leg muscles because that local interference local fatigue local mpk activation local glycogen depletion

that's going to be something that interferes much more so if you're using mostly leg based cardio try to do more of it or more intense or more long duration on the upper body days and vice versa cardio that doesn't last a long time is really good if it's under 30 minutes I generally just tend not to worry about it in many cases if it's like 45 minutes or an hour of cardio yeah like that's going to be a thing so less duration of cardio was totally good for a lot of people you know 15 to

20 minutes of of a decent intensity cardio after exercise especially if it's upper body work and the cardio's lower body it's just nothing right home about it's almost certainly just barely going to affect you and it's totally good to go in addition to that if you can slam a post-workout shake before cardio or just sip your shakes during cardio if it's low intensity enough that's a big deal because it starts to refeed and recover your body even while you're doing the cardio situation and in many cases if you really minimize these variables and kind of

follow this advice for minimization you're going to get undetectable differences in muscle growth uh versus no cardio at all and at worst just a few percentage points less growth you still get amazing gains but not quite the best gains you could have gotten but they're still amazing versus if you really Crank That post-workout cardio in kind of all the wrongest possible ways then you're going to cost yourself like something like halfway your gains in some extreme cases and that's not that great and even if it's okay just know that that's what's going on so again

toer at something really really really really important the most likely outcome of flubbing really badly on this and doing a ton of really intense cardio after a lot of your weight training sessions is that you grow less muscle and gain less strength than you otherwise could that still means you're gaining and if you ever want to gain much more just pull back on your cardio and boom you're unlocking new gains that were always there for you ready for the taking net muscle and strength loss like hey after your card if you didn't do that cardio

you have gained muscle but because you did it you actually lost muscle and like a week later you have less muscle because you've been doing that that's much more likely if you are doing really intense really high volume cardio like an hour and a half of really intense cardio and um really it's folks that are really hypocaloric dieting to try to get leaner or for a show and other such exotic Pursuits so you're almost certainly not going to lose muscle which is a big myth that we encounter all the time people see some kind of

person like me or some other Fitness influencer say Hey listen cardio can interfere with gains and for some reason they automatically go oh my God that means if I do any cardio at all I'm going to lose all of my muscle and that might happen to you but that's only because God picked you out and hates you and just Zapped you with a Zeus invisible lightning and just hit you right in the quads and your quads melt away because you did one extra step because you parked your car one spot away further than the usual

Scott when you go to various places because now you're super important ultra wealthy person do you have um a a spot for your car everywhere you go that you understand to be functionally yours yeah absolutely and others need to understand that as well yeah that's why I have like the brush guards on my car so I just push people out of the way easy I'm parking where I'm parking get out of my way old lady oh you're in a wheelchair many other jokes I could have followed out that I'm just not going to do it

Scott and I trying to be good people it's our 2025 New Year's resolution cross next year Scott what was our New Year's resolution uh be good people yes yes and we're well on our way and to that end what is the best approach to timing your weights on cardio from the big picture to zoom out I'd say the third best approach you could use is to do low intensity cardio as low as you can manage whatever you need for as little as you need maybe 20 or 30 minutes after your workout while drinking your protein

and carbost workout Shake that's damn good even better is to do low intensity cardio for 20 to 30 minutes before your workout while staying hydrated maybe have your element pack in there with some water you get your electrolytes and your hydration uh kind of replenished and then some and basically use that cardio as a little bit of way to get cardio a little bit of a warm-up then you hit the weights and then you just go into your car you pull out your your know protein in your carbs you begin to eat them you scroll

on Instagram to see if the love of your life unblocked you yet she hasn't you start to cry again but tears are anabolic and I've been clear about that since day one the ideal thing to do if you still need to do cardio but you also need to do weights and you really want almost no interference effect whatsoever or none really is to split your cardio and weights into two different sessions maybe if you have a regular day job that means in the morning you wake up you go downstairs you do your treadmill work you

say what's up to the girl in the hotel or the the apartment gym that you train at you're like what's up and she's like hi you're like fucking uh good busy day today she's like it's 7 in the morning I haven't started my day and you're like right I meant like an up upcoming I'll just I'm just I'm just going to do my cardio and she already walked out that's when you do your cardio and then after work you do your weights workout or the other way around or you get out from work you do

your weights workout you come home you have a meal you chill pull up her profile again nothing as a matter of fact Instagram shut your in Instagram down because basically meta is like you can't keep sending this woman messages from different accounts that you're starting you don't know what to do with yourself and then it's maybe 10 p.m. and you go for a nice little cardio walk around the neighborhood or you go back to the gym to talk to that one awkward girl from early in the morning and then you're good to go so in

each case we separate weights and cardio by multiple hours probably four at least and then you're good to go and then there's no interference hardly at all if you need any more resources to help you in your fitness journey including stuff like this we have the RP hypertrophy app there's Link in the description we have the RP diet coach app there's Link in the description these apps can take all the big brain thinking and tracking and progression right out of your head and they put it right into your phone and it keeps track of everything

you can customize anything you want they're awesome apps we only made them for two reasons one is to help you get in exactly the shape that you want and are capable of getting and two is that Mr Nick Shaw the CEO of RP tells me that he's absolutely never ever ever flying Pride it ever again he only wants to fly in his own space shuttle and space shuttles are not free and so he needs the money please get the apps to support Mr Nick Shaw's exorbitant spending habits and I'll see you guys next time [Music]