Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / Strength Training and Endurance After 40 (Without Killing Your Gains) | Ep 443

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Strength Training and Endurance After 40 (Without Killing Your Gains) | Ep 443 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:01
  Philip Pape: Does cardio really kill your gains?
• 0:03
  Philip Pape: You've heard it before, and if you're over 40 and you love running, you love cycling or anything endurance, that advice puts you in an impossible spot.
• 0:12
  Philip Pape: Give up what you love or accept that you'll never build real muscle.
• 0:16
  Philip Pape: And it turns out that neither is true.
• 0:18
  Philip Pape: The latest research on over a thousand athletes shows that the interference effect, the idea that endurance training blocks muscle growth, is close to zero when you set up your training correctly.
• 0:29
  Philip Pape: So today you're gonna learn the one scheduling rule that eliminates most of the interference, why running and cycling affect your strength differently, and how much protein concurrent trainees actually need.
• 0:41
  Philip Pape: Spoiler, it is more than you think.
• 0:44
  Philip Pape: And this episode exists because of two listeners who asked me the same question within days of each other.
• 1:14
  Philip Pape: And the first one is Richard G.
• 1:16
  Philip Pape: He's over 60, he's a lifetime athlete, he's a physique university member, and he wrote to me and he said, Quote, my main question is how I can optimally combine the endurance sports I'm passionate about with the weight training and nutrition optimization to get the optimal results for the years to come.
• 1:32
  Philip Pape: And then we have Gerwin, who is 56, and asked almost the exact same thing, quote, how to balance cardio running and cycling endurance activities with strength training.
• 1:42
  Philip Pape: And if you want to submit your question for the show, just go to witsyweights.com slash question and I'll give you a shout out just like I did today.
• 1:49
  Philip Pape: Two people, the similar demographic, same question, same frustration.
• 1:54
  Philip Pape: So, Richard Gurwin, this one is for you.
• 1:57
  Philip Pape: Shout out to you.
• 1:58
  Philip Pape: And if you're in a similar spot, if you're training for endurance and lifting together and you're wondering if one is maybe canceling out the other or you can't do both, you're gonna want to hear this.
• 2:07
  Philip Pape: By the way, last week's, or yeah, the last solo episode I did was about handling conflicting goals.
• 2:12
  Philip Pape: So there's some similarities here, but we're really getting into endurance specifically and how to do that with your lifting.
• 2:17
  Philip Pape: If you stick around to the end, I'm gonna share a 10-second recovery check that can tell you whether your body can handle tomorrow's hard session or if you need to back up, it just takes 10 seconds.
• 2:27
  Philip Pape: All right, here's what we're covering today.
• 2:29
  Philip Pape: First, why the cardio kills gains narrative is pretty outdated at this point, and what the actual interference data looks like as of the last few years.
• 2:40
  Philip Pape: Second, the practical programming rules that let you train both without compromising.
• 2:45
  Philip Pape: And third, the nutrition and recovery factors that most concurrent trainees are still getting wrong, especially after 40.
• 2:52
  Philip Pape: And we're gonna fix that today.
• 2:53
  Philip Pape: Okay, let's start with what you've probably been told that if you want to build muscle, if you want to minimize, or if you want to build muscle, you have to minimize cardio, or do just walking, don't do too much other types of cardio, keep it short, do it on separate days.
• 3:06
  Philip Pape: If you have to do it, whatever you do, don't run.
• 3:09
  Philip Pape: Okay, and it might sound like some advice I've given to some extent, but again, context is everything.
• 3:14
  Philip Pape: And the general advice where this whole, like, you know, lose fat and build muscle without cardio, it's called the interference effect, the idea that cardio interferes with building muscle.
• 3:24
  Philip Pape: And it was first described back in 1980 by Robert Hickson.
• 3:27
  Philip Pape: He showed that combining strength and endurance training in the same program produce smaller strength gains than strength training alone.
• 3:34
  Philip Pape: And for about four decades, the fitness industry turned that into a blanketed rule that you have to pick one or the other.
• 3:41
  Philip Pape: And even as I got into this space about five, seven years ago, it was still a fairly dominant narrative.
• 3:47
  Philip Pape: And I've only recently started to see more concurrent and hybrid training philosophies take hold as we see, you know, big, strong, jacked, healthy, fit people doing both.
• 3:56
  Philip Pape: So if you are someone who does it because you love it, you love to ride a bike, you like to run, you love to swim, you love to hike, any kind of endurance work.
• 4:05
  Philip Pape: And yes, there are people like that.
• 4:06
  Philip Pape: I say that a little bit jokingly because to be honest, I do love sprinting, I do love hiking, I do love riding a bike occasionally.
• 4:13
  Philip Pape: So I so are there are modes of cardio that I enjoy.
• 4:15
  Philip Pape: And I and I assume you as a listener, there's something you enjoy.
• 4:19
  Philip Pape: You don't do it just because you're trying to burn calories or do exercise.
• 4:22
  Philip Pape: There, you know, maybe it's associated with an activity like a sport.
• 4:25
  Philip Pape: And then you also want to build or maintain muscle.
• 4:28
  Philip Pape: Of course, we want to do that no matter what, especially as we age.
• 4:32
  Philip Pape: And so this puts you in a little bit of a bind, right?
• 4:35
  Philip Pape: Do you give up the activities that keep you, you know, sane and healthy and you enjoy them, or do you just accept subpar results and in the gym?
• 4:43
  Philip Pape: And this is what I call a false dichotomy.
• 4:45
  Philip Pape: You don't have to choose, it's not one or the other.
• 4:47
  Philip Pape: You're not asking the right question.
• 4:49
  Philip Pape: And the research from the last few years makes this really clear.
• 4:53
  Philip Pape: So we are evidence-based here, meaning we want to combine research with, you know, scientific papers, with evidence, with anecdote, with coaching experience, all of it together, as well as what you found out about yourself.
• 5:04
  Philip Pape: Let's talk about the research.
• 5:05
  Philip Pape: A 2022 meta-analysis in sports medicine looked at 43 studies.
• 5:09
  Philip Pape: There were over a thousand subjects, and they found the effective endurance training on hypertrophy, that's building muscle, that's muscle size, was actually close to zero.
• 5:19
  Philip Pape: Actually, not even very small.
• 5:20
  Philip Pape: It was pretty much zero statistically.
• 5:22
  Philip Pape: The standardized mean difference was negative 0.01, and for maximal strength, it was 0.06.
• 5:29
  Philip Pape: Not statistically significant.
• 5:31
  Philip Pape: The only measurable interference was on explosive power, and even that went away when people separated their training sessions.
• 5:39
  Philip Pape: And then really recently, just a little over a year ago, 2024, a meta analysis of 59 studies, over 1,300 participants confirmed this, but they added a little bit of nuance.
• 5:50
  Philip Pape: In men, there were some lower body strength interference, and in women, there wasn't any.
• 5:55
  Philip Pape: Neither group showed a meaningful interference for upper body strength or hypertrophy.
• 6:00
  Philip Pape: So the interference effect, the way you could state this truthfully is it is real, but far smaller than people claim or think, and it's highly conditional.
• 6:10
  Philip Pape: It's context-based.
• 6:12
  Philip Pape: It depends on how you structure your sessions, what type of endurance work you're doing, and whether you're recovering adequately.
• 6:20
  Philip Pape: And the recovery, I think I was I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, and he said, look, recovery is the one training variable, the one goal that never goes away.
• 6:27
  Philip Pape: So why does interference happen when it does happen?
• 6:31
  Philip Pape: And for many years, the explanation was, I'll say, molecular.
• 6:36
  Philip Pape: There's an enzyme called AMPK that gets activated by endurance exercise.
• 6:41
  Philip Pape: And it was supposed to inhibit mTOR, the pathway that drives muscle protein synthesis.
• 6:46
  Philip Pape: I mentioned this on the last episode.
• 6:47
  Philip Pape: Endurance flips one switch, strength flips the opposite, and when you do both, they cancel out, and maybe one interferes with the other in terms of an adaptation.
• 6:55
  Philip Pape: Nice, clean, simple model, and there's some problems with it.
• 6:59
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 6:59
  Philip Pape: There's nuance, I should say, because actual human studies have failed to confirm this.
• 7:06
  Philip Pape: One study found that 30 minutes of cycling at 70% VO2 max after a resistance training session did not reduce mTOR signaling at all.
• 7:16
  Philip Pape: Another show that HIT combined with training elevated mTOR above resistance training alone.
• 7:21
  Philip Pape: So, this what they call antagonism, you know, the opposite effect, the AMPAK and the mTOR antagonism that we see in like a cell culture or in, let's say, rat studies, doesn't necessarily translate cleanly to humans who are doing real-world training.
• 7:36
  Philip Pape: And this is just a thing that we see a lot in the research.
• 7:39
  Philip Pape: People make inferences or extrapolations based on rodent models or based on what they see in a petri dish, and it doesn't always apply at the systematic human level.
• 7:49
  Philip Pape: And so the emerging consensus, and this is from just last year, 2025 review, is that interference is better explained by what's called a residual fatigue model.
• 8:00
  Philip Pape: So when interference happens, it's because the accumulated fatigue from endurance work compromises the quality of your resistance training.
• 8:11
  Philip Pape: So that's a very interesting, different way to think about it, isn't it?
• 8:14
  Philip Pape: It's about the accumulated fatigue from the endurance work.
• 8:19
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 8:20
  Philip Pape: It's where you show up to do a squat, heavy squats, after you had a hard run the day before, you know, like a 5K run or something, and your legs are kind of cooked and you can't hit those planned weights.
• 8:33
  Philip Pape: You just have too much fatigue, and then over time, that's even more fatigue and less stimulus of strength.
• 8:38
  Philip Pape: And so this is a reframe on this.
• 8:40
  Philip Pape: It's very helpful because fatigue is a problem of your programming and your recovery, not the fact that you're doing strength training with cardio.
• 8:51
  Philip Pape: And so we have solutions to this.
• 8:53
  Philip Pape: Ah, so that leads me to the next section, which is the the the how to manage this biological thing that we can control, which is fatigue, but not the molecular thing that we can't control, which turns out to not be the cause anyway.
• 9:09
  Philip Pape: All right, so there are three levers here that matter the most of how to manage your programming to eliminate any chance of interference.
• 9:17
  Philip Pape: It's your timing of your sessions, it's the order of your exercises, and it's the endurance modality.
• 9:24
  Philip Pape: So let's walk through each one, okay?
• 9:26
  Philip Pape: First, session timing.
• 9:28
  Philip Pape: This is the most powerful variable.
• 9:30
  Philip Pape: And if you only take one thing from this episode, make it this.
• 9:34
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 9:34
  Philip Pape: So again, looking at the evidence, a 2016 study on 58 rugby players compared doing strength and endurance in the same session, separating them by six hours, and separating them by 24 hours.
• 9:46
  Philip Pape: The six-hour group saw 12.8% greater lower body strength gains than the same session group.
• 9:54
  Philip Pape: And then the 24-hour group did the best of all.
• 9:56
  Philip Pape: So the takeaway is to separate your strength and endurance sessions by at least six hours if you can.
• 10:03
  Philip Pape: If you could even put them on different days entirely, even better.
• 10:07
  Philip Pape: And so the practical tip I have is that if you can put strength and endurance on separate days, you'll get the best outcome.
• 10:14
  Philip Pape: Second best is on the same day, but at least six hours apart.
• 10:17
  Philip Pape: And then the third best is the same session, but start with your strength training, then do your cardio.
• 10:23
  Philip Pape: The worst case is the same session with endurance first.
• 10:26
  Philip Pape: And I would say, even for endurance athletes, this is still a good approach.
• 10:30
  Philip Pape: So that's it.
• 10:31
  Philip Pape: That's your cheat sheet for how to schedule your training sessions.
• 10:35
  Philip Pape: Um by the way, we are putting together, we're putting together a hybrid training program in physique university that that has the middle ground.
• 10:44
  Philip Pape: It actually has small manageable resistance or cardio work prescribed after, right after certain training sessions, but we only do that to make it a prescribed thing.
• 10:55
  Philip Pape: You could always put them on your rest days.
• 10:57
  Philip Pape: It's a five-day program, so you could always put them on the other days.
• 11:00
  Philip Pape: But sometimes for practicality, it makes more sense to put them together.
• 11:04
  Philip Pape: So that's the timing.
• 11:06
  Philip Pape: Now, second is exercise order.
• 11:08
  Philip Pape: When you do have to train both in the same session, so that was a good segue after I just said that, you're gonna lift first.
• 11:14
  Philip Pape: There have been studies that show that you have greater lower body strength gains when you start with lower body and then do cardio.
• 11:24
  Philip Pape: And oftentimes I tell people to put the cardio on upper body days, but we don't see as big effects on hypertrophy.
• 11:31
  Philip Pape: So strength and hypertrophy, two different things.
• 11:33
  Philip Pape: The strength is what often gets hit, and that doesn't, it's not all like a be all end all.
• 11:38
  Philip Pape: Depends on what your goal is.
• 11:39
  Philip Pape: If you're somebody who's trying to do both lifting and hypertrophy and cardio, you may not be going after absolute total strength gains.
• 11:46
  Philip Pape: But even if you are, again, it depends on the order and the and the timing.
• 11:49
  Philip Pape: So it doesn't really have an effect on hypertrophy or static strength, what they call, or VO2 max or body composition.
• 11:56
  Philip Pape: And if I I think the study showed that the strength first advantage was most pronounced at a twice per week frequency.
• 12:05
  Philip Pape: So if you're only hitting the gym twice a week and adding cardio after, make sure the barbell comes first and then the cardio afterward.
• 12:13
  Philip Pape: Now, so that's that's exercise order.
• 12:15
  Philip Pape: I hope I was clear on that.
• 12:16
  Philip Pape: Just basically lift first.
• 12:17
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 12:18
  Philip Pape: Now, endurance, the endurance mode or modality, and this is interesting because I think it's counterintuitive.
• 12:24
  Philip Pape: So take running and cycling, they affect your strength differently.
• 12:29
  Philip Pape: And and I pick those two specifically because they use the legs and they're different than walking.
• 12:34
  Philip Pape: Like we all we all know that almost intuitively a walking is a pretty relaxing, low interference type thing.
• 12:40
  Philip Pape: But of course, if you start hiking or adding a rucksack or something, then it approaches something closer to running a little bit.
• 12:46
  Philip Pape: But let's just take running and cycling.
• 12:48
  Philip Pape: So, what is running?
• 12:49
  Philip Pape: Well, running involves repetitive, eccentric loading.
• 12:53
  Philip Pape: Every foot strike requires your muscles to absorb force, and that creates more muscle damage, which means more inflammation, which means longer time to recover.
• 13:02
  Philip Pape: Whereas cycling is predominantly concentric.
• 13:06
  Philip Pape: You're pushing against the pedal, against the resistance, right?
• 13:10
  Philip Pape: Whether it's just a free bike or it's an assault bike or a spin bike or whatever, and you don't have the impact-driven damage that you have from running.
• 13:19
  Philip Pape: So you'd expect cycling to cause less interference, correct?
• 13:22
  Philip Pape: Okay, you know this is a trick question.
• 13:25
  Philip Pape: At moderate intensities, that is what the data shows.
• 13:29
  Philip Pape: Running produces a lot more, what they call decrements, right?
• 13:33
  Philip Pape: Reduction in hypertrophy and strength.
• 13:35
  Philip Pape: And cycling doesn't.
• 13:36
  Philip Pape: So at moderate intensities, running is not as great.
• 13:41
  Philip Pape: But at high intensities, it actually flips around.
• 13:44
  Philip Pape: High intensity cycling creates significant local fatigue in your quads.
• 13:50
  Philip Pape: And those happen to be the muscles that you test when you do legs, squats, and leg presses, like in these lower body studies.
• 13:56
  Philip Pape: So the interference becomes muscle group specific.
• 14:00
  Philip Pape: So if it's muscle group specific specific, what is the takeaway here?
• 14:04
  Philip Pape: Well, the takeaway is if you can keep most of your endurance work at low intensity, you're gonna avoid this.
• 14:10
  Philip Pape: And that's if you like zones, that's like zone two conversational pace or less, obviously.
• 14:15
  Philip Pape: And it's Andy Galpin.
• 14:17
  Philip Pape: He's he's actually the guy behind behind Vitality Blueprint, where we've partnered with our blood work analysis.
• 14:23
  Philip Pape: He he the way he put it is zone two has almost no ability to block hypertrophy when you're working at a conversational pace.
• 14:29
  Philip Pape: So it becomes just as recoverable and zero impact as walking.
• 14:33
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 14:34
  Philip Pape: So an easy, a long, easy ride, even a slow run might be perfectly fine, is what I'm getting at.
• 14:41
  Philip Pape: What creates the problems is accumulating too much time in that moderate to hard middle zone, like zone three and four work, that generates significant fatigue and and doesn't produce the unique adaptations either.
• 14:55
  Philip Pape: So about 80% easy and 20% hard for your cardio, it lines up really well with concurrent training.
• 15:03
  Philip Pape: 80% easy cardio and 20% hard cardio.
• 15:06
  Philip Pape: However you want to define that.
• 15:07
  Philip Pape: It's kind of in the context of zones, the way I just put it, but a lot of that, a lot of that's gonna be very individualistic based on your biofeedback.
• 15:14
  Philip Pape: And when you do this split, the 80-20, you get the cardiovascular benefits from the easy work, right?
• 15:19
  Philip Pape: Because you do, you get cardiovascular benefits even from walking and from lifting, as we've talked about recently.
• 15:25
  Philip Pape: You also get the performance stimulus from the hard session.
• 15:28
  Philip Pape: So if you're trying to improve your endurance performance, the specificity, right?
• 15:32
  Philip Pape: Or power or some speed or something like that, and then you're not accumulating what you might call junk fatigue in the middle.
• 15:41
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 15:42
  Philip Pape: So that kind of clarifies the big takeaways on what to do about it.
• 15:47
  Philip Pape: Remember, stick around to the end because I'm I have a 10-second recovery check that's going to be super helpful.
• 15:52
  Philip Pape: And if you're thinking, okay, how do I actually structure my week to balance both cardio and strength training?
• 15:59
  Philip Pape: And again, a perfectly smooth segue into talking about my app Fitness Lab because a lot of you aren't sure what it even does.
• 16:07
  Philip Pape: I actually sent out a question in my list and said, Hey, why haven't you tried checked out Fitness Lab?
• 16:10
  Philip Pape: And a lot of people say, Well, I'm not really sure if it's going to help me.
• 16:13
  Philip Pape: Well, here's a cool thing that it does.
• 16:15
  Philip Pape: Very specific.
• 16:16
  Philip Pape: Okay, very specific thing it can do.
• 16:18
  Philip Pape: When you onboard, it asks about how you like to train and whether you have endurance priorities or not, and whether you're working with a trainer or you want the program, the app to make your training for you.
• 16:27
  Philip Pape: But then at any time from the rest of the time you start using the app, there's a coach in the app.
• 16:32
  Philip Pape: It's basically an AI chatbot, but it's trained on all my stuff as well as a little bit of my personality.
• 16:39
  Philip Pape: I like to joke that I'm trying to replicate myself.
• 16:41
  Philip Pape: It's like a replicant.
• 16:43
  Philip Pape: And you can tell that coach at any time, hey, my priorities are changed, or I want to focus on strength versus endurance or versus cardio, or I have a run coming up, I have a competition coming up, I have a powerlifting meet coming up, and it will say, All right, let's, we're gonna tweak your activities going forward, your training, your nutrition, your recovery recommendations exactly around that thing you want to do.
• 17:03
  Philip Pape: And so if your focus shifts right in the middle of the year or a few months from now, you know, maybe you're building strength to begin with, and then you're like, oh no, I really want to do this bike race or this ultra marathon.
• 17:14
  Philip Pape: You could tell it, how about this is coming up on this date.
• 17:16
  Philip Pape: Help me come up with a training plan.
• 17:18
  Philip Pape: And it will come up with an entire training plan to do that based on the evidence, and it's gonna map it out and then start giving you those specific training protocols and activities going.
• 17:28
  Philip Pape: I mean, literally, it'll tell you your runs, it'll tell you your lifting sessions, it'll tell you what to do.
• 17:32
  Philip Pape: And the whole thing just recalibrates, right?
• 17:35
  Philip Pape: That's what's really cool about the app.
• 17:37
  Philip Pape: I really wanted to share that because I'm so passionate about how much it's helping people without they don't have to overthink it.
• 17:42
  Philip Pape: They don't need a trainer, they don't need a lot of things that we needed in the past, and now technology allows us to do it.
• 17:48
  Philip Pape: Anyway, check out the show notes for 20% off link that's in there for Fitness Lab.
• 17:52
  Philip Pape: You won't regret it.
• 17:53
  Philip Pape: Try it out.
• 17:54
  Philip Pape: Try it out and let me know what you think.
• 17:55
  Philip Pape: We're always making improvements, we're always fixing bugs and all that good stuff as well.
• 17:59
  Philip Pape: All right, so we've covered the training mechanics, and now I kind of want to zoom out because this episode is specifically for people in the 40 to 60 plus range, just like our two listeners.
• 18:09
  Philip Pape: And the case for combining strength and endurance training is actually stronger for this demographic demographic than any other.
• 18:16
  Philip Pape: Surprise if you're surprised to hear that, let me explain.
• 18:19
  Philip Pape: Okay, I'm gonna give you a number.
• 18:20
  Philip Pape: A large-scale study found that people who do both resistance and aerobic exercise have a 40% reduction in all-cause mortality compared to people who do neither.
• 18:31
  Philip Pape: Now, from strength alone, it's 21%.
• 18:35
  Philip Pape: From aerobic alone, cardio alone, it's 18 to 29%, but the combination produces this synergistic reduction in all-cause mortality of boom, 40%.
• 18:47
  Philip Pape: That is huge.
• 18:50
  Philip Pape: For preserving muscle, the stakes are really high, right?
• 18:53
  Philip Pape: We know this.
• 18:54
  Philip Pape: This is why we talk about strength training.
• 18:55
  Philip Pape: You lose 3 to 8% of muscle mass per decade after age 30, it accelerates after 60.
• 19:01
  Philip Pape: And then endurance-only athletes have it way worse because they maintain some semblance of cardiovascular fitness, but then they preferentially lose type two muscle fibers.
• 19:12
  Philip Pape: Those are the fast twitch fibers responsible for power output and fall prevention because they're not lifting weights.
• 19:18
  Philip Pape: And so that just exacerbates the problem as you age.
• 19:22
  Philip Pape: And here's something to reassure the endurance athletes who are listening.
• 19:26
  Philip Pape: Okay, I am on your side.
• 19:28
  Philip Pape: As much as in the past, I might have poo-pooed cardio just a bit.
• 19:31
  Philip Pape: You know, we've done lots of things in the last year alone, including physique university with our adaptive cardio workshop that we did that acknowledges how important cardio is within this context.
• 19:40
  Philip Pape: A 2022 meta-analysis specifically looked at whether age modifies the interference effect.
• 19:46
  Philip Pape: It doesn't.
• 19:47
  Philip Pape: It doesn't.
• 19:48
  Philip Pape: The over 40 subgroup had no greater interference than people in 18 to 40 group.
• 19:54
  Philip Pape: And the probable reason is most people over 40 who are adding strength training are probably pretty new to it, and untrained individuals show virtually no interference.
• 20:07
  Philip Pape: And there was another analysis that confirmed this untrained subjects had an interference effect close to zero.
• 20:12
  Philip Pape: So the irony here is that the population most worried about interference, those of you over 40, over 50, even in your 60s, older endurance athletes adding lifting for the first time, that's the population least likely to experience interference.
• 20:29
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 20:29
  Philip Pape: So if you're over 40 and you've been doing endurance your whole life and you're now just adding strength training, don't worry about it.
• 20:35
  Philip Pape: Do it.
• 20:35
  Philip Pape: Go do it.
• 20:35
  Philip Pape: The interference effect is basically not a factor for you.
• 20:38
  Philip Pape: For bone density specifically, combining training is one of the most effective non-uh-pharmacological strategies against age-related bone loss.
• 20:48
  Philip Pape: And this is really important for cyclists, for swimmers, because non-weight-bearing sports provide just the bare minimum of bone stimulus on their own.
• 20:59
  Philip Pape: A lot of people think somehow like biking is gonna, you know, help maintain your bone.
• 21:03
  Philip Pape: It's not.
• 21:04
  Philip Pape: It's not.
• 21:04
  Philip Pape: If cycling is your primary activity, you're not lifting, you are missing a huge piece of your skeletal health.
• 21:10
  Philip Pape: And that's just to maintain your bone density.
• 21:12
  Philip Pape: If you've already experienced bone loss or osteoporosis, really the only way to reverse that is a combination of strength training and some impact work, some kind of jumping and impact work, which beyond the scope of this episode, I just wanted to throw that in there.
• 21:26
  Philip Pape: All right, so that's the training side.
• 21:28
  Philip Pape: Separate your sessions, lift first when you can, keep most endurance, low intensity, and don't panic about this whole interference thing.
• 21:36
  Philip Pape: But none of that is gonna work if, guess what, your nutrition and your recovery aren't supporting this dual demand.
• 21:43
  Philip Pape: And that is where a lot of concurrent trainees are hurting themselves because the errors are very common in this population and they're often invisible.
• 21:54
  Philip Pape: And we like to talk about those things and make them visible on this show.
• 21:57
  Philip Pape: So, starting with, we're talking nutrition here.
• 21:59
  Philip Pape: Starting with protein, there are some standard recommendation recommendations out there.
• 22:04
  Philip Pape: And we talk about the like 0.7 grams per pound minimum for you know for athletes, for people who listen to the show, for people who lift weights.
• 22:13
  Philip Pape: I would say if you're doing concurrent training, you should probably have more protein, like be closer to the one gram per pound, maybe a little more, but one at least.
• 22:21
  Philip Pape: And that's because endurance exercise activates an enzyme that increases leucine oxidation, meaning your body burns through more amino acids during that aerobic work.
• 22:33
  Philip Pape: So there's less available for muscle repair afterward.
• 22:36
  Philip Pape: There was a study that showed plasma leucine dropping by 11 to 33% during or after cardio sessions.
• 22:43
  Philip Pape: And so it's just, it's just a to be safe kind of thing.
• 22:48
  Philip Pape: Like I would get more protein.
• 22:49
  Philip Pape: You're just doing more overall volume and activity anyway.
• 22:52
  Philip Pape: And then if you're in a fat loss phase, if you're in an energy deficit, I tend to recommend higher fat or higher protein in those phases anyway.
• 22:59
  Philip Pape: For older trainees who are doing concurrent training, I would say that the per meal doses, well, the total daily intake is always the most important thing.
• 23:11
  Philip Pape: But I would also encourage, you know, having protein at every meal anyway, not necessarily for the protein stimulus or the anabolic response, more for practicality to make sure that you get enough protein.
• 23:24
  Philip Pape: That's more of a practical tip.
• 23:25
  Philip Pape: So that's protein.
• 23:26
  Philip Pape: Carbs, this is where so many people are undereating, especially if you're doing cardio.
• 23:31
  Philip Pape: And I think it matters because glycogen depletion worsens the interference effect at the molecular level.
• 23:37
  Philip Pape: Now, there have been some chats in our Facebook group about a recent study showing a few differences with glycogen depletion that make it seem like less of an issue than it is.
• 23:45
  Philip Pape: But in reality, and working with clients, the energy, the recovery, the ability to build muscle, the ability to fuel up, the ability to hit long sessions, to last through your sessions, you know, all of that seems to be highly sensitive to carbohydrates for most people, such that having a lot of carbs to support your training sessions is really helpful, including your cardio training sessions.
• 24:09
  Philip Pape: And in fact, the study I'm talking about in our Facebook group didn't actually fuel the athletes with very many carbs during the training session like you normally would.
• 24:17
  Philip Pape: So that was one of the problems I had with the study.
• 24:20
  Philip Pape: But you know what?
• 24:21
  Philip Pape: Practical experience proves this out time and time again.
• 24:24
  Philip Pape: Unless you're avoiding carbs for some legitimate reason, like you can't eat certain foods or you have intolerances or they just don't have helped you at all.
• 24:31
  Philip Pape: Um, there's no reason to avoid them.
• 24:33
  Philip Pape: The only other time you would eat low carb would probably be during a fat loss phase when you simply don't have as many calories to play with.
• 24:40
  Philip Pape: So I would target quite a, you know, plenty of carbs.
• 24:43
  Philip Pape: Like, like don't go low carb and don't go keto just for the sake of it.
• 24:46
  Philip Pape: There's definitely no other benefits to it.
• 24:48
  Philip Pape: If you enjoy it or whatever, that's fine.
• 24:50
  Philip Pape: But carbs tend to be your friend in these cases for all the glycolytic activity, for the strength training, for the cardio, all of it.
• 24:57
  Philip Pape: And eating before you train is helpful, eating after you train is helpful.
• 25:00
  Philip Pape: You've got to experiment with it, though, to see what really helps you.
• 25:04
  Philip Pape: And then total calories, really, it's this is the same for anybody.
• 25:08
  Philip Pape: The risk, I think, with people doing concurrent training is you may be burning a lot more calories.
• 25:13
  Philip Pape: You actually may have a higher expenditure, which is another reason to consider a hybrid or concurrent training mode.
• 25:18
  Philip Pape: And it's not so much different than when we say, hey, lift weights, walk, and then add in some cardio if you need to burn some more calories.
• 25:24
  Philip Pape: That's still a legitimate strategy.
• 25:26
  Philip Pape: The last thing is, you know, supplement or not last, two more things.
• 25:29
  Philip Pape: I have I have a supplement and then one more thing.
• 25:31
  Philip Pape: So creatine, I'm just gonna mention it.
• 25:33
  Philip Pape: Occasionally I mention it.
• 25:34
  Philip Pape: I think creatine is great for everybody.
• 25:36
  Philip Pape: There's a few people that don't respond to it.
• 25:38
  Philip Pape: There's a tiny percentage of people that are allergic to it, but it's very tiny.
• 25:41
  Philip Pape: And it's it's great because it enhances, you know, ATP, a density, adenosine triphosphate, an energy source for your cells.
• 25:49
  Philip Pape: It enhances the resynthesis of ATP during high-intensity efforts, which, if you're doing medium to high intensity cardio or if you're doing heavy strength training, they both kind of are similar from that respect.
• 26:01
  Philip Pape: And then it supports resynthesis of glycogen when you're taking it with carbohydrates.
• 26:06
  Philip Pape: This is why, again, I think having carbs is helpful for most people.
• 26:10
  Philip Pape: It ends up, and so you can enhance some of this with creatine.
• 26:14
  Philip Pape: And there you go.
• 26:14
  Philip Pape: Okay, and the last thing I want to mention here is sleep.
• 26:16
  Philip Pape: Of course, you've got to get a lot of sleep.
• 26:18
  Philip Pape: Although people doing a lot of cardio tend to need even more sleep.
• 26:22
  Philip Pape: Let's just be honest.
• 26:22
  Philip Pape: Like athletes, you think about it, you need like nine hours sometimes, you know, eight, nine.
• 26:26
  Philip Pape: You shouldn't be a six hour sleeper and try to do all this necessarily.
• 26:30
  Philip Pape: I guess the the exception would be if if you just if you just are perfectly fine at that level and you're not in a fat loss phase and you're eating plenty of food, like there could be a tiny case for certain people to be able to get away with this.
• 26:42
  Philip Pape: But generally, you know, more sleep the better, more high quality sleep the better.
• 26:46
  Philip Pape: If not, you can fit in some naps, potentially things like that.
• 26:49
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 26:49
  Philip Pape: I want to tell you really quickly what I'm not claiming here because the nuance always gets lost.
• 26:54
  Philip Pape: And this is by the way, where the YouTubers never make it to this part of the episode.
• 26:58
  Philip Pape: So most of the time when I comment on a YouTube comment, it's hey, I it looks like you didn't read the it looks like you didn't listen to the episode, did you?
• 27:04
  Philip Pape: Like I don't even answer their question or their comment because it obviously they didn't listen to the episode.
• 27:09
  Philip Pape: So I'm not saying, this is what I'm not saying.
• 27:11
  Philip Pape: I'm not saying cardio has no impact on strength.
• 27:14
  Philip Pape: It can definitely impact strength, especially if you're doing high volume, high intensity endurance work, especially in the same session as you're lifting, especially without adequate recovery.
• 27:23
  Philip Pape: And a lot of you are doing all the group classes, all the spin classes, you're doing a lot of cardio beyond what I'm talking about.
• 27:30
  Philip Pape: I am not saying that you can train like a marathoner and a power lifter at the same time and maximize both.
• 27:36
  Philip Pape: There are trade-offs.
• 27:37
  Philip Pape: We have had folks on the show who put in a lot of miles running and they maintain their strength.
• 27:43
  Philip Pape: Maybe they slightly build their strength, but they're not going after massive all-time PRs until they dial back on the endurance side of things.
• 27:51
  Philip Pape: If you're trying to run a fast race and you're trying to also PR your deadlift, then something's probably gonna give and you're not gonna get there unless you're a total beginner and those numbers are kind of low.
• 28:02
  Philip Pape: You know, like the performance standard hasn't really been set very high yet.
• 28:06
  Philip Pape: Now, I'm not saying that you can ignore nutrition and recovery and just train smarter.
• 28:10
  Philip Pape: I'm not saying that either, right?
• 28:12
  Philip Pape: The programming rules only work when you have a foundation of enough protein and carbs and sleep and all these things.
• 28:18
  Philip Pape: And I'm not saying that you should add more training to an already packed schedule.
• 28:24
  Philip Pape: So when you listen to wits and weights, don't think I'm telling you to do more, more, more.
• 28:28
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 28:29
  Philip Pape: If you're doing six days of endurance work and you want to add four days of lifting, that's 10 sessions a week.
• 28:35
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 28:35
  Philip Pape: If you even have a job, a normal job, even if it's working just the bare minimum of 40 hours, and I say that because so many people are working beyond that, and you have your family and you take, you have your finances, you have all this stuff, that is a recipe for burnout.
• 28:49
  Philip Pape: You might need to trade some endurance volume for some strength training volume, not stack things on top.
• 28:54
  Philip Pape: You've got to make the trade-offs.
• 28:55
  Philip Pape: But what I am saying is that, oh, by the way, if you're retired, I guess you're the one category for those of you over 60 who may be able to have some more of this in there.
• 29:03
  Philip Pape: If you concurrently do both endurance and strength training, or you want to, and you've been worried that one is canceling out the other, the science says you're probably fine.
• 29:12
  Philip Pape: Just separate your sessions, prioritize lifting when you're fresh, eat enough food, protein, carbs, sleep enough, and your body can adapt to both simultaneously.
• 29:22
  Philip Pape: Believe it or not.
• 29:23
  Philip Pape: It is more of a fatigue, recovery, and programming problem, not a biological limitation.
• 29:30
  Philip Pape: Before I let you go, I promised you a 10-second morning recovery check.
• 29:34
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna share it in just a second, but this entire episode happened because two listeners, Richard and Gerwin, sent me their questions.
• 29:41
  Philip Pape: If there's something you want me to cover on the show, if you want me to give you a shout out, go to witzawaits.com slash question.
• 29:48
  Philip Pape: And there's a very high chance that will become an episode, and there's a 100% chance that I will reply regardless.
• 29:54
  Philip Pape: All right, if you want to know if your body is ready for a hard session, or should you swap in an easy day?
• 30:02
  Philip Pape: Here's a check that takes 10 seconds.
• 30:05
  Philip Pape: When you wake up before you get out of bed, ask yourself three questions.
• 30:09
  Philip Pape: One, did I sleep through the night or was it a very broken sleep?
• 30:14
  Philip Pape: Two, when I think about today's training, do I feel motivated or am I dreading it?
• 30:20
  Philip Pape: Three, do I feel physically rested or does my body feel heavy?
• 30:25
  Philip Pape: If you answer positively on all three, you're ready to train hard, don't overthink it, just go do it.
• 30:31
  Philip Pape: If one of these are off, proceed, but be open to a tiny bit of flexibility.
• 30:36
  Philip Pape: And by that I mean some auto-regulation in your training.
• 30:40
  Philip Pape: I don't mean skip your training.
• 30:42
  Philip Pape: I don't mean cut out half the exercises.
• 30:44
  Philip Pape: I just mean be ready as you're warming up to be smart about it.
• 30:48
  Philip Pape: If two or three of these questions are off, then seriously consider what you did the night before.
• 30:54
  Philip Pape: I'm kind of joking.
• 30:56
  Philip Pape: I'm kind of joking.
• 30:57
  Philip Pape: But this is just a recovery check from a biofeedback perspective.
• 31:01
  Philip Pape: It doesn't mean you don't do the hard things.
• 31:02
  Philip Pape: It doesn't mean you don't try to go to the gym and get your training in.
• 31:05
  Philip Pape: It just means you can be aware how that connects to how you might feel in the training or how you're auto-regulating or why your legs feel sluggish or why you're not able to get that last rep.
• 31:15
  Philip Pape: Not meant to be used as an excuse, as an excuse.
• 31:20
  Philip Pape: This is so that you know the link between your intensity and your daily readiness.
• 31:26
  Philip Pape: And don't keep things so rigid that you, for example, hurt yourself, or so rigid that you give up because of this information.
• 31:35
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 31:35
  Philip Pape: And you don't even need a wearable, you just need those 10 seconds and those three questions that I just asked.
• 31:40
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 31:40
  Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights.
• 31:44
  Philip Pape: And remember, strength and endurance are not enemies, they are partners.
• 31:47
  Philip Pape: And the people who figure out how to train both are the ones who stay strong, fit, and healthy for decades.
• 31:52
  Philip Pape: I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.