July 14, 2026

Episode Transcript

Kirby Coggins, Strength Trainer, KPI Fit and TY Specialist

[00:00:00]

Welcome everybody. I’m Kirby Coggins. I’m the strength trainer here at KPI Fit and in partnership with TY Healthspan. So let’s get into it.

Today our topic is cardio done right, and specifically how to use it so it actually helps, whether you’re chasing a goal related to sport or if you’re just trying to get in shape for general health and longevity. I say, cardio has a reputation problem amongst the weightlifters and the runners, ’cause the weightlifters think that it’ll eat away at their, muscle gains and the runners think that weightlifting is going to make them bulky and slow.

And both of them are true, but, the like most things, the truth kind of lies in the middle. And we’ve only [00:01:00] got about 20 minutes, so we’re gonna speak pretty generally about things, and if you have specific questions as it pertains to your sport or your goals, let me know and we can have a conversation about that.

And two, today what we’re gonna cover is, one, why cardio is a non-negotiable. Two, can cardio actually hurt your progress? Three, the one thing that people miss when it comes to timing with their cardio. And four, what to do with your goal, whether it’s fat loss, muscle gain, endurance, or longevity

All right. So cardio isn’t good or bad. It’s a dose, and getting the prescription right is the only thing that matters. Like I said before, lifters think it eats muscle. Runners think lifting makes them slow. Athletes need both [00:02:00] strong cardiovascular systems as well as strong muscles, and the truth is everyone needs both.

So everyone’s an athlete, it’s just where do you fall on the intensity spectrum?

Why this is so important, and I wanna emphasize this more than anything else, uh, your cardio respiratory fitness is– and your VO2 max specifically, is the highest predictor of your mortality risk. Even if you were to be unfit and not smoke a cigarette ever, you can still be more unhealthy than a, a frequent smoker.

So that’s… I want to reiterate that your cardio fitness is non-negotiable

So [00:03:00] specifically, if I were to be speaking to an athlete that was primarily focused on weightlifting and getting stronger and avoiding cardio, I would say that cardio isn’t taking away from your ability to recover. Building that engine actually helps you recover faster So that you can recover faster either between sets or even between, like, workout days.

So if you’re feeling like you can only lift every two days, you might benefit from building up your aerobic capacity so that your muscles are able to, either 24 hours or maybe 12 hours.

Cardio doesn’t steal your recovery. It buys you more of it. This is actually backwards from most, what most people in a weight room would believe. The thinking goes, I have a limited [00:04:00] recovery budget, and cardio spends some of that recovery budget, so cardio is actually costing me gains. That’s not how the engine works.

A bigger aerobic base means you clear fatigue faster between your sets. It means you clear fatigue faster between sessions, which means you can handle more hard sets more often and actually absorb them. And more quality volume that you recover from is the thing that’s going to drive your growth.

So cardio is actually going to feed your lifting gains. If you’re skipping cardio to protect your gains, you’re not actually protecting your gains. You’re capping them

And what that would look like for lifters, most of your cardio should actually feel easier than you think, and that’s where this magical zone two that we keep talking about comes in. Zone two is, it’s supposed to be easy and a conversational pace, and you could be talking to me the whole time, complete sentences.[00:05:00]

That’s the cardio that feels like you’re not really doing anything, but it’s building the engine and your capacity, and that actually doesn’t interfere with your lifting. It’s easy to do, and you don’t really need to feel like you’re at the fully recovered and primed. You can always go for a walk.

Even after heavy left leg days, like, you, you can always put in a few thousand steps.

And the threshold where we’re talking about, like, zone three and four, comfortably hard. You can still talk, but short sentences. And VO2 max work is your where you’re going all out, full tilt. If you have done a VO2 max test with us, you’ll be very familiar with what that feels like. We really push you to the limit, and the only thing that’s running through your head is, “Get me off of this treadmill.”

Like, “I want the mask off. I [00:06:00] can’t breathe.” And, it’s important to push yourself to that level every so often, but the bulk of your cardio should not be feeling like that. We should be in that zone two, zone three area for majority of your cardio work And this is important to reiterate because people, if they don’t feel like they’re doing something, they…

If they don’t feel like they’re doing their cardio if they aren’t breaking a sweat and out of breath

People do their easy days too hard, and they do their hard days too easy because they’re already tired from the easy days. So everything kind of lands in this useless middle ground that’s very mediocre. It’s not easy enough to build base, and then it’s not hard enough to move the ceiling.

So building the base is what people miss. It’s not being lazy. [00:07:00] That’s the dose

All right. And the main point of my, attention-grabbing title is can cardio work against you? And the answer is yes, but it’s not really the reason you think it would be an interference effect where your aerobic strength can blunt your strength and muscle gains because you’re going into the gym and you’re trying to warm up, and you’ll go straight to the treadmill and run 30 minutes, and then try to spend 30 more minutes lifting after that. Your lifts are gonna be less intense because you’re not able to output the same amount of force, and lifting should be about pushing your, your outputs higher for your strength gains.

And if you’re already tired from the running, [00:08:00] your lifts are not gonna be as heavy. So for most people, flipping them and doing a light dynamic warm-up, and then putting the bulk of their workout into the lifting, and then it adding the cardio in at the end.

But it really depends on what you’re training for. We’re starting to see more and more sports that are emerging that are blending two worlds of cardio athletes and strength athletes. So it really depends where you would identify yourself in terms of your goals, or if you’re just generally looking for weight loss too, I would say the same would apply.

The lifting should be the bulk. If you need to gain muscle, where we would determine that through DEXA, if to increase [00:09:00] your metabolic burn rate so that you can burn calories more efficiently, even on your off days. That’s where I would put your effort into, and then adding in the cardio towards the end.

But very low intensity zone two cardio, like incline treadmill at like three speed for fifteen, twenty minutes. So if I had an hour to work out, I would do the thirty, forty-five minutes of lifting and then the fifteen to twenty minutes cardio at the end

As far as like how much interference Is a factor. Nobody’s ever lost their bench press PR to a 20-minute walk. So it’s all about, like, running a 5K and then going trying to bench your Personal Record. It’s just not conducive to pushing that [00:10:00] intensity And you should be tracking your lifting volume, like how many pounds per week are you lifting, just like you’re tracking your cardio volume in terms of like mileage.

Like, runners are very good about tracking, like I’m running 50 miles this week in preparation for my marathon, 100 miles this week. Just finding out where you’re at in your training and like bumping up the mileage is how they refer to it as. In weightlifting, you probably track your volume just to make sure you don’t have these spikes in volume that would be indicative of possible injury risk

And that’s why it’s important have a budget, for your lifts as well as cardio mileage. Staying on budget and tracking that. And like I said, lift first, condition second. Put your zone two after lift, not [00:11:00] before it

And yeah, here’s the part nobody says out loud. Most people aren’t lifting hard enough to begin with. So pre-fatiguing yourself takes a stimulus that was already too weak and makes it weaker. If it’s in the same session, the same minutes, better order. So it’s the same amount of time that you had already been there, we’re just optimizing it

Cardio isn’t just running. say running because it’s…when I think of cardio, I think of running because it’s just the easiest thing. You don’t need any equipment, it’s cheap, you can always just go for a walk. But you can change cardio based on your goals or what works for you.

People may avoid running because it’s high impact and there’s a lot of like eccentric loading. it can be more damaging on your knees, and that’s why you can [00:12:00] swap to either cycling, rowing,  the SkiErg, or the incline walk that I talked about earlier because it’s just lower impact, and they buy you the same amount of zone two engine building, for a fraction of the damage.

So just pick the modality that matches your goal, not the one that everybody else around you is doing

And there is no one size fits all, like I said before. It’s the outcome you’re chasing, and you kind of put yourself into a different camp. If you’re trying to build muscle, you train like this. If you’re focused on fat loss, train like this. And if you’re trying to be a hybrid athlete, training in the format that fits your sport.

Like, what does cardio look like in basketball? What does it look like in soccer? Two different things, because the basketball [00:13:00] court’s smaller than a soccer field. That’s kind of… You look at the gameplay and kind of base your cardio off of what you would see in the game. And then also just training for general longevity.

Like, what, what does your VO2 need to be at to be, you know, the top of your class or top of your age group?

And we can go into the specifics of if I was trying to build muscle, I would do the minimum effective dose, low impact, short, and keep it away from your heavy days or your heavy lifting days. Just enough to stay healthy and recover well, but not any more than that, because past that you are stealing recovery from the weight intensity And losing fat, you’re not gonna outwork a bad diet.

So that’s where we create the gap through your eating habits. And then [00:14:00] cardio is just that extra step that you take if you wanna accelerate towards your goals and getting to where you wanna be fat loss-wise and body composition-wise

‘Cause if you think about it, like a 45-minute workout can, you know, burn only 200, 250 calories, and that’s pretty intense, and you can also just eat a single donut, and that can be 200 calories. And so I, I don’t know about you, but I don’t have enough time in the day. I’d rather eat outpace my donuts with just the exercise.

So you have to make the donuts few and far between, versus running for four hours a day to try to keep on pace with that.

And so for the sports, you just look at the sport, for like HYROX and whatnot, you’re running eight kilometers and you’re also intermingling with heavy weightlifting. [00:15:00] If you look at the first stations in HYROX, you’re running a kilometer, doing a one kilometer skierg, running another kilometer.

So that’s 3K of just cardio before you even get to a strength ops, strength station, which is the, sled push. And so if you fry yourself on the first three kilometers, you’re not gonna have the strength to push the sled. And so that’s why we see a lot of people… Like the race is kind of won and lost in the sled push, but the run after the sled push is a, kind of a decider.

Because if you are able to have some capacity left in your legs after that run, whoever wins that run is typically in the best position, able to hold their position throughout the rest of the race. So that’s kind of like the make or break checkpoint. So you should train around that, and like train running 3K, being fatigued, and then [00:16:00] lifting while you’re fatigued.

I know that goes against what I was saying earlier, but you just train to fit your sport And generally, the baseline for everybody, you should be doing 150 minutes of easy cardio plus a little bit of sprint work for your, VO2 max, and that’s floor that everybody should be doing.

And that probably looks more like 7,000 steps a day and a couple of zone two sessions

And why I say seven thousand,  ten thousand is just a round, like a round nice number that  chosen,  during  older study.  think it’s good to chase 10K,  because  more than seven, and people usually fall short of things. But I would say the 10 to 12K is that  fat loss zone, and if you really wanna be serious about losing weight,  should  push yourself to do 12 to 15[00:17:00]

And one easy way to kind of keep that on your,  schedule is doing 10 to 15  minute walks after your meals to kind of like promote digestion and keeping your,  metabolism,  running smoothly

And that’s  biggest thing with cardio and whatnot is,  being consistent. So kind of tying it to something you’re already doing. You’re always gonna eat. So eating dinner, if you just make doing your 10 to 15-minute walk as automatic as you eating dinner every day and making that a non-negotiable, that’s how you build habits  and keep it,  keep yourself being consistent, and that’s where you’re gonna see the gains because you’re not gonna have these like…

 if you have a cheat meal, you’re gonna go on your walk. You need to have [00:18:00] something that’s consistent, otherwise you’re not gonna see  your results.

 So this just reiterates the,  prescriptions or the general prescriptions for fat loss, muscle gain, speed, power, HYROX hybrid, and just general health.

But again, every number that we went over is personal. Your zone two heart rate, your threshold, your VO2 max, and your lactate threshold is individual to you. And so  order to get those numbers, we have to do testing, and that’s why we do that here at TY HealthSpan, because we want

 So VO2 max and lactate threshold testing set your actual zones, which means your cardio gets prescribed to your goal instead of copied off of somebody else’s program. The right dose, the right timing, and the right kind of cardio

And we run that type of testing  we run that type of testing here at TY HealthSpan. [00:19:00] If you want your baseline, come find out

All right, and that’s why  run that type of testing here at TY Healthspan. If you wanna find your baseline, come find out and book us an assessment at tyhealthspan.com. So, all right, I’m gonna open it up to questions. Anybody wanna know- Okay  Kirby, we got, we got one.  can you give a real-life example of a training program and frequency?

Is it relates to, like, who, who am I talking to in terms of- How about for weight loss? For weight loss,  The habit building I would say the fifteen-minute post-meal walks, I would build from there, and that’s the consistent baseline, and that gets you maybe your, your forty-five minutes of walking.  and then if I [00:20:00] were to add in like the gym training sessions of three to four days a week on incline treadmill, I’d do the three miles an hour, maybe even as slow as, as two point five, and I would do like an incline of like twelve percent,  and do that for fifteen, thirty minutes, maybe forty-five if, if you have the time.

But that, that should kind of get you generally in that zone two for most people.  and from there

 it depends if,  they need to be gaining muscle as well. If, if you need to be gaining muscle, which is most people,  I would do those three to four  days a week of exercising for 60 to 90 minutes

One of the,  one of the questions has to do with,  sort of  muscle versus fat, kind of [00:21:00] to follow up on what you just said.  You know, that, that if you’re, if you’re  if you’re losing weight, it’s, you know, it seems like it’s counterproductive to, to gain, to gain muscle because muscle’s heavier than fat, but so you  you may not actually lose any real weight.

 I try to have the, the talk with people and kind of detach from the number on the scale,  and pay more attention to performance, and realize that your healthiest self, your healthiest, strongest self,  may actually be heavier than you think they should be

 here’s another question.  I think most people are familiar with,  tracking apps for, for running and walking and stuff like that. What’s a good app to, to keep up with that, the, the workout stuff that you were talking about, the, the lifting and the total load and all those kind of things?

 right now [00:22:00] they kind of specialize,  depending on what kind of training you’re doing. Strava’s very popular for the, the running, cycling community.  they, they also add in,  your, your zones there, so it’ll, it’ll track your zone two.  Hevy is good for the weightlifting volume, and it’ll show you your, like, how many pounds you’re lifting every week and how that’s trending.

 but the, the, the watches, like the Garmin watches and Apple watches, they have the Apple Health and Garmin apps. Those will also, similarly to Strava, tell you your, your zones and how much– Like, you can set goals for the week and see how close you are to filling out those, those thresholds. Okay. What is,

One of the things on one of those slides was [00:23:00] eccentric loading. Could you describe that? Yes. Eccentric loading. It was in relation to the knees and the running.  so concentrically- If you’re jumping, like that, that propulsive,  power and strength,  eccentrically would be like walking downstairs.

That’s why some people have pain only when they’re walking downstairs in their knees, like, like that, that’s that eccentric loading, the impact and absorbing,  That’s,  gonna be something that you should train probably in a more stable,  less repetitive  position that’s… And we, we can train like that here with like an eccentric training mode where we do a squat with 50 pounds on the concentric.

So you’re lifting up with 50 pounds, and then [00:24:00] it’ll load another 50 pounds, and you’ll be loading down with 100. Because your muscles can actually withstand more weight on the eccentric, like loading downwards, like on a…  that’s why for like pull-ups, one of the best ways to train for somebody who’s, isn’t able to do a pull-up is get up to the bar, chin to the bar, and then  lower as controlled as you can.

That’s the eccentric. So they can actually slow down the lowering, but they’re just unable to lift up,  with  the concentric motion. And,  running is just very high impact on that. You’re, you’re basically doing hundreds, a thousand, like  mini squats, and that impact is pretty,  aggressive on your knees if you don’t train up to it.

So that’s why you can’t just, like, just get super motivated and then go and run a marathon. Like, it’ll, it’s gonna really tear up your knees

[00:25:00] Okay, I think we’re at  after 7:30.  somebody, somebody put in, in the chat,  thought one of the, the best lines of the whole thing so far was, was you’re not gonna outwork a bad diet Yeah, it’s true. And so we’re, that, that leads us into the tease for next week, which is,  we’ll have our, Paige Love will be doing  nutrition,  healthy habit session for everybody.

 and her, she’s gonna be talking about summer,  how to, how to eat better during the summer when  you’re, when you’ve got all kinds of things going on like vacations and, and whatnot. Well, thanks, thanks Kirby a lot for, for a great session tonight. I know I learned a lot, and I’m pretty sure everybody else did.

And we thank you. All right. Thank you, guys.