And you're like, you know what you guys are getting instead of food that's a lot like food?

And they're like, what?

And you're like, cardio.

Nah.

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 weight in the gym a couple days a week, train to get jacked and 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 do cardio right after.

And it's cool.

You get to cool down from weights.

You get to listen to some music.

You 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 know 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 so they can see me staring at them.

Yes.

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 to the question of like, is this a bad idea to do cardio after weights?

Like, are they causing us some kind of muscle growth problem?

Let's take a step-by-step approach.

The first question I'm 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 to stimulate the muscles 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 they 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's 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 weights?

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 informed 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 at the gym.

And what is your body doing, what processes is it 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, it's 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 activity is huge in facilitating your muscles and the rest of your body for getting those growth pathways opened up as much as possible.

So when you're resting 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, after a 20-minute drive home, you get out of your car and you instantly like take off all your clothes in the street, the 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 a workout, your heart will pump 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...

Especially if you eat after training, 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 you eat your post-workout meal, your GI tract 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 than the 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 various hormones, myostatin, it's activated by resistance training, duh, that's what grows most of your muscles for you, and there's other pathways.

One of them is called AMP kinase, 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, AMPK 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 in 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 is 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 a 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 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 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 you 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 spider flight.

That scales with intensity.

If you do really easy cardio, you can actually have no sympathetic nervous system involved 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 inclined walking that's pretty tough, you're doing a step mill, you're doing the bicycle ergometer or anything that starts to 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 now 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 GI 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 low-grade 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 biceps 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 AMPK 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 muscle.

Now again, if you did triceps but you're doing, 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 tract 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 that going, which is good.

But if you're doing like hard sprint intervals or jogging or a really crazy elliptical and you do that for 45 minutes after your week's workout, that's an extra 45 minutes that your biceps that you just trained are like, hey, when are we getting fed?

And your body's like, shut up and suffer.

Like a mini David Goggins pops out 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 your biceps in, starved for nutrients.

Not starved in the capital S.

Your biceps are 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 bebopping 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.

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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 is it?

A couple of things.

The higher intensity of your cardio, the worse.

So if you're gasping for air after 30 minutes of 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 and doing hard cardio that involves your legs is definitely not ideal.