When Cardio is KILLING Your Gains (VIDEO PROOF!)

Does cardio training kill your gains? In this video, I’m going to show you how to approach your cardiovascular workouts so that you can get this all important work done without compromising your gains you’ve made in the gym. To illustrate this point, it’s important to first distinguish between the types of gains we are talking about. Strength is one of the most sought after assets one can gain from their workouts. That said, combining strength work with conditioning or cardio work is a big mistake and can be seen with just simple test.

Using the pullup exercise, we can see just how impactful a small amount of conditioning work can be to the output of the back muscles during the exercise. To start, perform a set of pullups fresh and see how many you can do to failure. It doesn’t matter when you do them but you should try to do them when you are most rested to get a true number. Be sure to go all the way down and get up as far as you can to get your chin up over the bar on every rep.

Note how many pullups you performed and then call it a day. Return to the gym the following day or even the day after and this time, before doing your set of pullups to failure, start with a simple set of 40-50 cone hops as shown in the video. This simple test of anaerobic power endurance is enough to cause some fatigue in the legs and more importantly, demand an increase in blood flow to the working legs during the movement. The blood is increased here in order to help attempt and oxygenate the working muscles as much as they can during this albeit anaerobic exercise, but also to help aid in the removal of the metabolites produce by muscular contraction that make continued work very difficult.

As soon as you are done with the jumps you want to get back up on the pullup bar and aim to complete another fresh set of pullups to failure. I say fresh because while your body may be feeling a bit fatigued from the jumping, your lats should be unaffected since they were no used at all in the jumping. From here, you should quickly notice that you just don’t feel as strong as you did the last time you did this. Why is this? Because your body will never be able to serve all of its masters well. While it may be able to redirect blood flow to the now working lats, it simply can’t do it as efficiently as it could had the muscles of the legs not already been drawing on the demands as well.

Because of this, the muscles in the lats will fatigue much faster. Attempting to increase your strength in this capacity is not going to be effective. You will never see top end increases in your muscular strength output and any gains in strength that you may have made to that point will be diminished by your existing fatigue. That makes improvements in strength nearly impossible if you choose to train this way.

If you are seeking strength gains then you should always aim to complete your cardio work on a day separate from your strength work. At the very least, if this is not possible, you can do your cardio work after you have already completed your strength exercises. It is simply not a good idea to try and bounce back and forth between exercises done with the purpose of increasing your strength while blitzing your body with conditioning movements as well.

If muscle hypertrophy and muscle gains are your goal on the other hand, then training like this may actually help you to make more functional gains. This is because you can still build muscle by simply reaching overload. What may be a lower threshold is still an overload as perceived by the body and therefore capable of igniting a hypertrophic response while demanding your body do this in a fatigued state. This is a more athletic way of taxing your body and ultimately a more realistic way.

[athleanx]

Before you suggest I wasn't recovered from the exercise I did the previous day remember this...I did one single set of pullups to concentric-only failure (no eccentric failure), rested 24 hours and came back to repeat this single set (except this time immediately preceded by a bout of conditioning work - which is currently a popular programming protocol). In any healthy individual, this single set would not prevent you from being able to repeat another single set a day later. In fact, most anybody with any training experience at all could reproduce another set to failure just MINUTES after completing the last one! That is what would occur in a normal workout. So no, a lack of recovery from the previous day is not in play here. Nor is the fact that I didn't rest between jumps and pullups from a muscle recovery standpoint. The lats did nothing during the jumps of course. What is in play here is the limitation of blood borne resources caused by the activity of the conditioning on the muscles of the legs leaving less of an ability in the lats to perform to their maximum because of their lack of these same resources. Strength gains will suffer if trained this way. Overall athleticism is improved.

[jshanker]

The guy to the far right at 0:22 did way too much cardio !!

[ToddDCLT]

I already do enough cardio running from my problems

[xpect]

To sum it up, do cardio after you workout or on a different day.

[hundle]

jeff your biceps are godamn 9 months pregnant

[I_am_milan]

When being alive is killing your gains

[sfiqfll]

I've seen many bodybuilders that cant run 50 meters and run out of breath. Thats pathetic i want a good ratio strength-cardio

[stamatisvragas]

My wife is killing my gains... both mascular and financial

[RobotReg]

Moral of the video: Do your cardio at the end of your workout or on another day.

[protog]

How laughing while reading the comments is killing your gains....

[gb_rad]

Jeff tries to photoshop himself skinny in the thumbnail but he still looks ripped af. How tf does that work? :|

[mrm]

Jeff's skinny photoshopped thumbnail still looks bigger than me smh

[cartergeier]

Just tryna look as good as Jeff in the thumbnail

[Bierhaai]

Pull ups are heavy energy demanded. So if you start pull ups instantly after jumping 40 times that obviously gives a disadvantage

[monke]

I've been strength training and doing cardio for years. Sometimes I would stop doing cardio for a couple months, and when i did, i gained a little bit of muscle (i mean a little bit) but i gained noticeable fat. Unless your doing more cardio than strength training, your not going to kill your gains. This has been my personal experience, obviously everyone is different.

[dmzsniper]

Video title should be fixed to state Cardio "before" strength training is killing your gains or something like that.

[LordWout]

Jeff still does more pullups than me after he did cardio :(

[nikolaosdrakopoulos]

Me: exists
Jeff: hexagon, pentagon, your gains gone

[JarodBillingslea]

When I played football during the summer for my high school, my coach always made us run after our strength workouts. And now that you mention it like this, this is exactly how I toned up from fat to lean over the summer before 12th grade. Im definitely going to stop walking/running before my workout and do that last from now on.

[jose.b]

I want to increase my strength without losing any speed guess I have to go ssj 2