Should You Do Cardio After Your Workout?

Doing cardio after your workout kills your gains, or at least that's what you've heard on the internet before. But is it actually true? Let me explain. There are 3 main reasons why cardio after your workout would kill your gains. The first one is going to be when your body gets done lifting weights, it is going to start the repair process. When you work out, you break your muscle fibers down. When you get done working out, you repair those. So it is going to have something called muscle protein synthesis. This is just the actual process your body goes through to build and recover and build muscle. It is believed when you do cardio after your workout, it stops and inhibits that muscle protein synthesis. The second reason is your muscle's main source of energy is something called Glycogen. It is believed that when you do cardio after your workout, you are using glycogen for energy. So if you're using glycogen for cardio, you're taking away from what your muscles could use for energy to recover from your workout, leading to less progress. And number 3, everybody's favorite word on the internet right now, cortisol. When you do cardio after your workout, it is believed to increase your cortisol, which again, cortisol just means stress. So you're increasing your stress, you're increasing your cortisol, which would make it harder for you to build muscle and recover from your workout. So these are the reasons why you would kill your gains. But here's what nobody ever tells you. Those 3 things I just showed you only happen if you are doing high intensity Cardio. And high-intensity cardio is just any form of cardio that gets your heart rate elevated, gets your heart rate super high. It's what most people think about when they're doing cardio, where you're like on the treadmill and you're gasping for air, or you're on the bike and you're gasping for air. When your heart rate is high, it is high-intensity cardio. But here's the thing, if you are doing low to moderate intensity cardio, You are not going to get any of those negative side effects that we just talked about that would come with high intensity cardio because low to moderate intensity cardio does not inhibit that muscle protein synthesis we talked about. It also uses fat as a source of energy for that exercise as opposed to using glycogen. Now this doesn't necessarily mean you're automatically going to burn fat, but we'll get to that a little bit later in this video. And because you're not putting a lot of stress on your body with low to moderate intensity, it is not going to raise your cortisol levels. So when you're doing low intensity cardio after your workout, you can absolutely still make gains with your strength training workouts. Now I know you're going to have some questions for me, so let me go through the 4 most common questions I know you're going to ask me. First and foremost, you're going to say, Eric, what are some examples of low intensity cardio? What is, What is too high of a heart rate for low intensity versus high intensity, so on and so forth. So when it comes to examples of low intensity cardio, this can literally be anything because low intensity versus high intensity is not dependent on like, oh, uh, your, your stair stepper, that's high intensity. Your incline walking, that's low intensity. High versus low intensity is dependent on your heart rate. So you could be doing the stair stepper at a low intensity by like not going as fast, or you might do it at a higher intensity if you crank up the speed of it. Or you could do the incline treadmill. You could be doing that at a low intensity if you're maybe not going that fast, or you could crank it up and go faster. That would be higher intensity. Running versus walking, high intensity versus low intensity. It also depends on your current fitness level. Somebody who maybe, you know, they might have 100 pounds to lose. Doing an incline walk might be high intensity for them because they might be getting their heart rate up when they're doing that walk. That is high intensity versus maybe somebody who they've been working out for 15 years and they incline walk every day. That might be low intensity for them because they might not have to spend, expend as much energy doing the exercise and they might have to tax themselves as much doing the exercise. So it would be low intensity. So it's dependent on your heart rate. And this is where I give 2 examples to know if you're in high intensity or low intensity. The first one I actually just mentioned, which was if you're doing cardio like this and you can't keep a conversation, that is high intensity cardio when you have to take all those breaths. Versus if you're doing a conversation like you're doing the stair stepper and you're kind of like talking like this right here where you're holding a conversation, maybe you're taking a breath every now and then, but But for the most part, you're able to hold a conversation, that is low intensity. If you want a little bit more in-depth on this, usually it is 60 to— your heart rate, 60 to 70% of your max heart rate. So I right now— the way you would find your max heart rate, take the number 220 and subtract it by your age. So right now I am 28 years old, my max heart rate would be 192. So if that's my max heart rate, 60 to 70% of my max heart rate would be roughly about 115 to 135 beats per minute. And so if you have like an Apple Watch or if you have something that tracks your heart rate, or even if like you're on the stair stepper and you're holding on to that like heart rate monitor thing, you would keep your— I would keep my heart rate within 115 to 135 beats per minute, and that would be considered low to moderate. intensity exercise. Once you start getting above that, you are more so transitioning into that higher intensity exercise. And now number 2, does that mean you should not do high intensity cardio? Well, it depends. Remember, if you are strength training, that is a high intensity exercise because think about when you're doing a set of— a hard set of 6 reps or 8 reps or 10 reps, that is high intensity. You are pushing hard during that exercise. And remember, your body doesn't even really know if you're doing cardio versus weights. It just knows stress that is placed on your body and it knows the energy system that you are using. So when you're doing your exercise, you are doing high intensity exercise with your weightlifting. If you would like to do high intensity cardio, I would either make it on a rest day. So on a day you are not working out, or I would do it roughly about 4 hours or more after your weightlifting session. The reason being 4 hours, that's, That's usually what the research shows us for what's called concurrent training where like you're doing more things at once. Usually you can recover, refuel, and then be able to go back without any negative side effects roughly about 4+ hours after. So if you are going to do high-intensity exercise, that's when I would do it. And I will talk a little bit more about what, how, how much high intensity you should be doing per week when I get to question number 4. But before I do that, let's talk about if you can do cardio before because you're like, all right, Eric, well you're telling me not to do high-intensity cardio after. Should I do high-intensity cardio before? No, you should not be doing high-intensity cardio before your weightlifting session because remember what we talked about earlier. For high-intensity cardio, your body is going to use glycogen. This is the main source of energy for your muscles. And so if you are depleting and using your glycogen before you go into your weightlifting session, what's going to happen? You're not going to be able to lift as heavy. You, your performance will decrease. You won't be able to push as hard, push close to failure on top of the fact In fact, you'll be fatigued from your cardio session and your weightlifting session has a higher risk of injury than what your cardio session does. So you want to do your weights before you do your cardio so you can have the best performance but also have the least risk of injury. So no, I would not do high intensity or I would not do low intensity cardio before your strength training workout. And some people, they kind of freak out about that. Let me explain this. It's one thing to do like a 10-minute little walk before you like go and lift weights. Like, that is— that's fine. If you're doing something more than like just a 5-10 minute warm-up, I would put that after your workout because you don't want to go into that strength training session fatigued, which would then decrease your performance. And at the very least, maybe you see progress, but you're not seeing as much progress as you potentially could. And the goal of this video is to optimize your strength training and your muscle building and, and so on and so forth. So I would not do cardio before. I would continue to do it after. And the very last point here that I want to touch on, and I'm going to actually throw in one more for you, I'm going to talk about fat loss after we touch on point number 4. I'm going to talk about fat loss. So give me a second. But low intensity cardio for heart health. I have people asking this, well, Eric, is low intensity zone 2, 60 to 70% of your target, you know, max heart rate. Is that enough for heart health? In fact, doing the 60 to 70% of your max heart rate, it's called zone 2 cardio. That is one of, if not the best things that you can do for your heart health. Okay? So yes, it is very beneficial for your heart health, but also remember you are still doing high intensity exercise when you're doing your strength training. That is a form of high intensity exercise. So it's not like you're not getting high intensity exercise. You're still getting that. And You would be getting your high— you would be getting your low-intensity steady-state cardio. And again, whether that's via the treadmill or whether that's via the bike or the elliptical, you know, whatever, whether it's via potentially just walking outside, right? Like that, you're still getting this and you're still getting the best of both worlds. If you want to do an extra HIIT cardio session per week, you could have some extra benefits from a heart health perspective. I would make it 1 day a week of 10 to 20 minutes. I know there's gonna be people out there who are watching this and they're like, well, wait a minute, Eric, I do 5 HIIT classes per week. I would not do that. If your goal is to get stronger and build muscle and, you know, change your physique and be more defined and be more toned and, and, you know, all those things, I just would not do that. I would lift weights 3 to 4 times a week. I would try to get your daily steps. So roughly about 5,000 to 10,000 steps per day. Haven't even talked about that yet, but that's incredibly important. And then I would maybe throw in your, you know, 1 to 3 hours a week of this low-intensity cardio. So like whether you're doing 30 minutes one day, 30 minutes the next day, that's an hour of low-intensity cardio per week on top of your weightlifting, on top of your daily steps. So that's what I would say there. And the last thing from a fat loss perspective, I said when you are doing high-intensity cardio where your heart rate is high, you're mainly burning glycogen for energy, Which again, glycogen, just think of it as carbohydrates. That's the main form of how you get glycogen, right? So you're burning carbohydrates. When you're doing low heart rate, low intensity exercise, you are burning fat for energy. But let me make something very clear. There is a difference between using fat for energy for a specific bout of exercise versus actually losing stored body fat. And I don't wanna lie to you here. Low intensity cardio isn't automatically going to burn more body fat. Yes, you burn more fat. You use more fat for energy when you're doing it, but unless you are in an overall calorie deficit, you will not be losing any stored body fat from your body because you could do—you could literally do four hours a day of low-intensity heart rate, low-intensity exercise. But if you're eating in a calorie surplus, you are going to gain body fat because actually losing stored body fat again comes down to an energy balance equation. You have to eat less. Calories than what you are burning. So, but what I will say is this, low heart rate versus high heart rate cardio. Usually high heart rate cardio, high intensity cardio leads to more cravings and it leads to you overeating a lot because your cortisol is raised. Um, you're not recovering from the workouts like we talked about, all those things. So you are actually, it's going to be harder for you to, I don't wanna say it's gonna be harder for you to lose body fat with high intensity cardio, but it definitely could be. Everybody's different, but it definitely could be because of those reasons I just mentioned. Whereas this low-intensity heart rate cardio, you're not going to have higher cravings. You're not going to be, you know, you're not going to have less recovery from your workouts. You're still going to expend energy. You're still going to burn calories because that's how really your cardio is going to help with your weight loss journey, which is burning more calories, right? creating this calorie deficit. You're expending and burning more calories and more energy. So you'll still be doing this without, again, the negative side effects of doing a lot of high-intensity, high-heart-rate cardio. So that's another reason why I recommend doing low-intensity cardio for fat loss as well. Really hope this video helped you. And if you are interested in getting coaching from myself and my team, click the description of this video. You will find some links there below that we offer coaching. Check it out. Other than that, hope this video helped and we'll chat soon.