The Strong Series is your weekly guide to training smarter, not just harder. Every week, we break down one thing that actually moves the needle.
Somewhere along the way, cardio and lifting became enemies.
If you want to build muscle, avoid running. If you do the StairMaster after legs, apparently your glutes disappear. If you enjoy a spin class, good luck ever getting strong again.
Thankfully, the human body is not quite that fragile.
Strength training and cardio can coexist extremely well. The issue isn't whether cardio is “killing your gains.” It's whether you're doing so much of it - or organizing it so poorly - that you're consistently too fatigued to train well.
Here's what actually matters.
1. Cardio Does Not Automatically Stop Muscle Growth
The interference effect is real, but often exaggerated.
Research shows that combining cardio and strength training generally doesn’t reduce muscle growth or maximal strength, though doing both in the same session may slightly impact explosive strength.
Very high amounts of endurance work can compete with recovery, but normal cardio isn’t going to erase your gains.
Training for a marathon while trying to maximize lower-body strength? That’s a different conversation.
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2. The Dose Matters
Twenty minutes of incline walking and 90 minutes of hard running are both technically “cardio,” but they create very different demands.
The more intense and frequent your cardio, the more recovery you'll need.
If muscle and strength are your priorities, most of your cardio does not need to be brutal. Walking, easy cycling, incline treadmill work and steady-state cardio can improve cardiovascular fitness without creating excessive fatigue.
HIIT has its place, but it is still training. Your body does not know that the 15 minutes of all-out intervals “didn't count” because you called it cardio.
3. If Strength Is the Priority, Lift First
If you're doing cardio and resistance training in the same workout, generally put the thing you care most about improving first.
For someone primarily trying to build muscle or get stronger, that usually means lifting before cardio.
Doing a hard run or intense StairMaster session before heavy squats can compromise your performance simply because you're fatigued. You haven't magically entered a catabolic state; you're simply tired.
Separating harder cardio and lifting sessions by several hours can also help manage fatigue.
If your “cardio” is a 10-minute easy walk to warm up, we do not need to start scheduling two-a-days.
Context matters.
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4. Think About Which Muscles You're Fatiguing
A hard cycling session the night before an intense quad day matters more than an easy walk.
Likewise, a long run creates more lower-body fatigue than 30 minutes of low-intensity upper-body-friendly cardio would.
When you're planning the week, look at the whole picture rather than treating cardio as something happening outside your program.
If Monday is a hard lower-body day and Tuesday is an intense run, your legs have effectively trained hard two days in a row.
That can absolutely work if you're conditioned for it. But if your Wednesday leg session suddenly feels terrible every week, the answer probably isn't that you've lost all your strength.
You may just need to rearrange things.
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5. Walking Is Criminally Underrated
Not every cardiovascular benefit needs to come from a workout that requires emotional preparation beforehand.
Walking increases daily movement, is easy to recover from, and can be layered onto a lifting routine without significantly competing with it.
That doesn't mean everyone needs an arbitrary 10,000-step target.
If you enjoy more intense cardio, do that too. Your exercise routine should contain things you actually like.
We're just giving you permission to stop assuming that harder always means better.
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6. Eat Enough to Support Both
Sometimes the problem blamed on cardio is actually under-fuelling.
If you're lifting, doing cardio and walking regularly while eating in a calorie deficit, your recovery and performance can suffer. That isn't because cardio inherently destroys muscle; you're asking your body to do more work without necessarily giving it more resources.
Protein matters, but so do total calories and carbohydrates to fuel your workouts.
If building muscle is the goal, make sure you're eating enough to support your activity.
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7. The Best Cardio Is the Cardio You Can Recover From
You do not need to choose between being strong and having good cardiovascular fitness.
Lift hard. Do cardio. Walk. Take the Pilates class. Go for a run if you genuinely love running.
Then pay attention to what happens.
If your lifts are progressing, you're recovering and you feel good, there is no need to remove cardio because someone online told you it was “killing your gains.”
Your body can do more than one thing.
We promise.
