Cardio and Weight Lifting

One fitness related question we get is will cardio affect my ability to put on muscle mass? Or where in my workout should I do my cardio. This seemingly simple question has some nuanced answers. 

First off, when talking about building muscle mass, we need to be calorie positive aka eating more than we are burning. If you are in a calorie deficit, it is almost impossible to add any significant amount of muscle mass, without exogenous help. So if your cardio is putting you into a calorie deficit, you should skip it all together. If you are able to stay calorie positive, where you put it in your workout does not matter much. The only other consideration is the cardio impacting your ability to recover from a workout and then not train again when you want too. Building muscle is often a function of volume. If your cardio is impacting your ability to maintain a training volume, you might want to consider lowering it, or switching it out. Often things like running will make us more sore because of the eccentric forces. If you switch to something like cycling, you will be able to do your cardio while being less sore and allowing yourself to continue to train at your prescribed volume. 

I would also like to address pure strength training. While muscle building and strength building overlap they have some distinct differences. With strength building, the loads being used are often very high. This is where I would caution doing cardio before lifting. If the cardio you did has created too much fatigue, it will be hard to maintain ideal lifting technique, and the likelihood of an injury increases. It is often more advantageous to put your cardio at the end of a workout so you can achieve your training goal without hurting oneself. 

The last point is the skipping of cardio altogether. I would also caution against that. A single bout of cardio exercise has been shown to positively impact more than 9,000 molecules for health. There are simply too many positive benefits to cardio exercise to skip it all together. All of these considerations will allow you to grow muscle while doing cardio, if your training is adequate.

Hopefully this helps clear some of the air around cardio and weight lifting. Keep training everyone!