How To Do Cardio Without Losing Muscle

Are you wondering whether you should do cardio before or after you lift weights? Well, I've coached over 25,000 people in their fat loss and muscle building journey, and I've gotten in pretty decent shape myself. So in this video, I'm going to give you a simple, straightforward, to-the-point answer of whether you should do cardio before or after you lift weights so you never have to wonder about it again. But before I give you the exact answer, I need to talk about why it's even important in the first place. If you do your cardio and weights out of order, you could end up with some negative side effects like losing muscle, slowing down your fat loss, increasing your risk of injury, and quite frankly, just wasting more time doing work but not actually changing your body or getting the results you want, which we both know that sucks. So speaking of reaching your goals, when to do your cardio actually depends on what your goal So in this video, I'm going to give you the answer to 3 different goals. If your main goal is to build muscle, lose fat, or lose fat and build muscle at the same time. And let's start with the first one, building muscle. If your main goal is to build muscle, the timing of your cardio matters a ton because in order to build muscle, you need energy, which by the way, Energy comes in the form of calories. If you don't have enough energy, you won't be able to push as hard as you can in your workouts, which that's what actually causes the muscle growth. And you won't be able to recover from your workouts enough, which actually allows you to build muscle. It's one thing to go into the gym and push yourself. It's another thing to recover from the workouts because that's where you build muscle. The issue with doing too much cardio Or cardio at the wrong time is cardio also requires energy. And so if you're doing too much or at the wrong time, you are going to use the energy that you would be using for building muscle towards cardio. And this is why you would lose muscle, or at the very least not gain muscle if you don't do this correctly. And this is why I recommend doing cardio after you lift weights because you want as much energy as possible to be able to put towards your weightlifting workout. And not to mention, if you're going into your weightlifting workout fatigued and less energy because you did too much cardio beforehand, you're also going to go into the weightlifting session increasing your risk of injury. Because let's think about it, what requires more form? What requires more attention to detail? Walking on the treadmill or the stair stepper or doing a squat, a deadlift, a shoulder press, a bench press, a hip thrust? Those exercises require more effort and they require more form, correct form, otherwise you get injured. So going into your weightlifting session after cardio way increases your risk of injury. And if you get injured, you're not building muscle, I'm not building muscle, nobody's happy. But here's the thing, just doing the cardio after the workout isn't actually enough to make this right. There's something else you need to know because you also need to make sure you're doing the right kind of cardio and the right amount of cardio after your workout. Doing a lot of high intensity or HIIT style workouts can Also negatively impact your ability to build muscle because these higher intensity workouts put a lot of stress on your body. You already just put stress on your body from your weightlifting workout that you did. And so if you add more stress, like we talked about earlier, that is more you're going to have to recover from, which takes away from your ability to build muscle. If you also have to recover from a different kind of high-intensity exercise. Whereas when you do low-intensity exercise, this is where your heart rate stays around 60 to 70% of your max target heart rate, or for even simpler terms, you should be able to hold a conversation when you're doing your cardio. That's how you know you're doing a lower-intensity style of cardio. This style of cardio does not Negatively impact your recovery. It does not add stress to your body. Really all it does is improve your cardio, your heart health, your cardiovascular health, and it burns some extra calories without adding stress. So we have to make sure we're doing more low-intensity cardio after our workout, and we got to get the right amount because again, if you do too much, you are going to use too much energy. You're going to burn too much energy. Too many calories that would then take away from your ability to build muscle. So what I like to coach our online coaching clients on is after your workout, 15 to 30 minutes of low intensity steady state cardio. This could be on the treadmill, this could be incline walk, this could be stair stepper, rower, bike, whichever form of cardio you hate the least. That's what you can do. after your workout. And it's actually exactly what our client Victor did and our client Stephanie did to both help them build some muscle in their workouts and lose fat, as you can see as well. And speaking of losing fat as well, let's talk about if your main goal is to lose fat, when should you do your cardio? If your main goal is to lose fat, just like building muscle, the timing and duration of your cardio matters a ton. So as you may know by now, but just to Be sure to lose fat, you need a calorie deficit. This is where you are eating less calories than what your body is burning, which by the way, if you don't know how many calories you should be eating to lose fat, there is a free calorie calculator in the description of this video. So you can use that, enter your information, it'll send right over to you for free. So check it out if you'd like. It's the same one I use with my online coaching clients. So cardio is a tool to help you burn more calories like we talked about in the previous point. But the thing about cardio is it doesn't have to be in the gym or it doesn't have to be during a workout. And let me explain. This is a representation of how your body burns calories in a day. 70% comes from something called your BMR. This is how many calories your body burns at rest. Doing nothing. Also, the next 15% comes from something called your NEAT, your non-exercise activity thermogenesis. This just means all the daily movement during the day that's not a dedicated exercise. So me doing this with my hands, fidgeting, walking, whether it's walking outside, cleaning the house, walking in the grocery store, whatever, that takes up 15%. of how many calories your body burns. 10% is from something called TEF, your thermic effect of food, how many calories your body burns through eating food. And the last 5% comes from something called EAT, your exercise activity thermogenesis. This is actually where your cardio falls, in that 5%. I know it's kind of crazy to think about. So the cardio you're doing in the gym doesn't really make that huge of a difference. But what does make a difference is your daily movement. And you can do 2 main things to increase your daily movement, which would increase the 15% here of how many calories your body burns in a day. Number one is to simply stand more. A lot of people watching this, myself included, have a desk job. So, if you do have a desk job, just standing more is going to improve and increase that 15%. And then number 2 is your daily steps. And this is where these daily steps don't have to be at a certain pace. They don't have to be at a certain time. All steps count. So, whether you're taking the stairs instead of the escalator, whether you're walking around your house cleaning more, whether you're parking farther away at the grocery store when you're running errands, whether it's taking a 10 or a 15-minute walk throughout the day after your meals, any daily steps count. So this is where we encourage and coach our online coaching clients to do these 2 things to improve and increase that 15% to get them way more bang for your buck and This tends to be easier to implement into your life rather than trying to do 30, 60, 90 minutes of cardio per day or throughout the week. And to be quite frank with you, most of the clients that we coach are just regular people. Like, they have jobs, they have kids, they have families, social life. They're not fitness enthusiasts and they're not people who are bodybuilders or trainers. So we also understand your time in your workouts is limited. Because you can get your daily steps and stand more and daily movement any time of the day, we want your activity to be centered around weightlifting because you can't just stop and do 5 sets of lat pulldowns in the middle of your workday. I guess maybe if you're a trainer and you work in the gym, you could, but everybody else, you can't do that. So we want that dedicated time to be focused on weightlifting because you can't do it Any other time, whereas the cardio you can. Now with that being said, we still have found something helpful for when you do your cardio, either before or after you lift weights. And this is not erasing very well, so give me a second. One eternity later. Because daily steps make such a huge part of your calorie burn for the day, and because we still want to focus Our efforts on our weightlifting workout. A couple of things can work for your cardio for fat loss. That would be first, 10 to 15 minutes of cardio before a workout can help you increase your daily steps. It can help you burn a little bit extra calories and get some blood flow going before your weightlifting workout. Now, as long as you keep it to 10 to 15 minutes. And as long as you keep it to low intensity, this can be beneficial. If you go high intensity or if you go beyond 15 minutes, then it could be detrimental like we talked about earlier. So if you want to do that before a workout and you have time, you can. And now you might be thinking, okay, Eric, well, what if my goal is to lose fat and build muscle at the same time? We're going to cover that right now. So when it comes to losing fat and building muscle at the same time, There are going to be some similarities to what we've already talked about, but there are going to be a few key differences as well. And the first one being, you're going to have to balance your intensity and your recovery for both your weights and cardio. Because if you end up doing too much weightlifting, it's going to backfire. I'll tell you how in a second. And if you end up doing too much cardio, It's going to backfire and I'll tell you how. Either one of these will end up in you either overtraining or under-recovering, and this is going to lead to increased cravings, increased appetite and hunger. Both those things aren't very good for fat loss. It's also going to lead to not being able to build muscle because you're not recovering from your workouts. It's going to lead to more injuries, more aches and pains, less Performance in your workout, those things are not good for building muscle. So it's kind of like this double-edged whammy where you don't get either one if you don't get this right. And so it's important to set up your weekly workouts both with weightlifting and cardio so that you can balance these two. And before I show you what a weekly workout routine might look like, there's something that's going to be a little bit different than what we've talked about Thus far, and that is going to be considering having cardio days for your cardio. Because thus far we've said you can either do it before your workout, after you lift weights, but when you're trying to do both of these things and balance everything, both from an intensity perspective, you may not be able to do your cardio after your workout if you're really pushing yourself in the weights. And you may not be able to even do, like, time-wise, you might not have enough time to get in the cardio. Then you end up skipping it. Then you may not lose as much fat as you want. So as opposed to trying to fit everything all on one day, it may just make more sense to include some cardio-specific days, and then you do your weightlifting days. Because you want to stay consistent with your cardio and you want to be able to physically and mentally Push yourself in your weights to build the muscle. So when we look at what a week's worth of workouts might look like to balance both cardio and weightlifting, you might go with Monday is a leg day, a lower body workout, and then maybe you do 10 to 15 minutes of low-intensity cardio after your workout on a Monday. Then Tuesday rolls around. Let's say you just do an upper body workout. Maybe you're busy on Tuesday, you can't get a ton of extra time in, totally fine. And then when it comes to Wednesday, you make this a cardio day, or maybe you go in and you do roughly 30 minutes of low-intensity cardio, bike, treadmill, stair stepper, whatever you hate the least, right? Then on Thursday, we go back and we do Another leg day. Maybe you don't get any extra cardio after this day because you're busy, whatever the case may be. Friday rolls around, you do an upper body workout and 15 minutes of cardio after because Friday we're like, fuck it, the week's over. We just want to go home and we leave work early. And then Saturday, let's say you do another cardio session and maybe this is a 20, 30-minute bike ride with your spouse Or your friends or your family. Maybe you go for a 20 or 30-minute run. And then Sunday is just hitting your daily steps. Nothing, nothing like specific, not going into the gym, not doing that, just hitting your daily steps. This is now a weekly workout routine where you're maximizing your weightlifting for your muscle building and you're also maximizing your cardio for your fat loss. We can do this within the week, split it up to make sure we're recovering, make sure we're pushing ourselves as hard as we can, and this is what that would look like. And now, if you're like, well, Eric, what do I do on the workout days? What do I do for my leg day or my upper body day or my cardio day? And if you're like, Eric, I now have— I got this information, but what do I do with my nutrition? You can click the link in the description of this video below to check out our online coaching program. You will get a personalized plan built specifically for you, and you'll get paired up with a one-on-one coach to check in with you and hold you accountable, answer questions along the way. So again, link is in the description if you want to check that out, or you can head to watch this video next if you want 9 years of honest weight loss advice in 17 minutes.