I sat down recently with Dr. Alyssa Olenick, exercise physiologist, 17-time ultramarathoner, and, by her own admission, “a true and true little meathead,” to settle something I get asked about constantly: does cardio kill your gains?
You’ve heard the fear. Do too much cardio and you’ll blunt your strength. Lift too much and you’ll never be “athletic.” Pick a lane. I’ve never believed that framework serves anyone, and after this conversation, there’s little doubt.
Here’s what I want you to walk away with.
Concurrent training is not a trend. It’s just training.
Everyone’s calling it “hybrid training” right now. Fine, call it whatever gets you to do it. In the literature, it has a much less sexy name: concurrent training, defined simply as resistance training and cardiovascular training happening in the same week, or even the same session. That’s it. That’s the “hybrid athlete.”
And here’s the part that matters for muscle-centric medicine: this is not a niche approach for people chasing a HYROX medal. This is the prescription for health. Our exercise guidelines already call for both. The problem isn’t the model, it’s that most people are doing neither one with enough intensity to matter.
The “interference effect” is real, but it’s smaller than the internet wants you to believe
The boogeyman here traces back to a 1980 Hickson study showing that combining endurance and strength training blunted strength gains in both men and women. That study has been doing a lot of work on social media ever since.
The truth, as Alyssa laid it out: for the vast majority of people, not elite, highly specified athletes, the interference effect is minor. What’s really driving that “my lifts feel off” sensation after a hard run isn’t some irreversible cellular sabotage. It’s largely central nervous system fatigue, carryover tiredness from one session bleeding into the next. Running taxes the nervous system more than cycling does, which is why a hard run the day before leg day hits differently than a bike ride would.
The fix isn’t abandoning cardio. It’s sequencing it intelligently:
- Separate your hardest cardio and hardest lifting sessions when you can.
- If you must do both close together, know your output on the second one may dip slightly. That’s expected and not a failure.
- Fuel the demand. This is where I want to be direct with you: carbohydrates are protein-sparing. If you are adding real cardiovascular volume on top of resistance training and you are not eating enough carbohydrate, your body will find protein to burn for fuel, and that protein was supposed to be building and defending your muscle.
Women don’t need a different training model. They need a harder one.
This is the point I want tattooed somewhere in the algorithm: women adapt to resistance training the same way men do. We are a different sex, not a different species. There is no secret women’s protocol hiding in the literature. What the data does suggest is that many women are simply under-trained going into these studies. They’ve never been exposed to what a true 8-or-9-out-of-10 effort really feels like, so they train at what feels hard (a 5 or 6) without ever getting the stimulus required to change tissue.
If you’ve been frustrated that your training “isn’t working,” ask yourself honestly: are you training close to failure, or does it just feel that way because you’ve never had a reference point for hard?
Estrogen is not the reason you build muscle
I want to correct a narrative that’s spreading unchecked: estrogen is not the primary driver of muscle mass or muscle loss at menopause. If it were, restoring estrogen would fully restore lost muscle, and it doesn’t. Across the perimenopause-to-menopause transition, resistance training remains the dominant lever, even more than protein intake alone. Protein is non-negotiable, but protein without a mechanical stimulus is not going to build or protect tissue. You need both, and the training is doing more of the heavy lifting than the hormone conversation suggests.
Train the hip and spine like your bones depend on it, because they do
If there’s one practical takeaway to build your week around, it’s this: prioritize the squat and the hip hinge. Not because of aesthetics, but because these movement patterns load the hip and spine, the exact regions where bone mineral density loss shows up first and hardest in women, especially around the menopause transition.
Walking is not enough. I’ve said this publicly and I’ll say it again here: walking does not provide sufficient mechanical load to stimulate meaningful bone or muscle adaptation. It’s a baseline, not a stimulus. Running is a step up. But loaded resistance training and impact, jumping, hopping, power work, is what signals bone to rebuild.
Don’t forget power. You lose it faster than you lose strength.
There’s a newer term worth knowing: “powerpenia,” the accelerated loss of power (not just strength) as we age. Power is what lets you catch yourself when you trip, or get out of a chair fast. It fades earlier and faster than raw strength, and almost nobody trains for it.
The fix doesn’t require becoming a plyo athlete overnight. Start small: pogo hops, kettlebell swings, a squat performed for speed instead of load. Even minimal, progressive impact work has been shown to improve bone density in peri- and post-menopausal women. Build it into the training you’re already doing; it doesn’t need its own separate day.
Watch for the early signs of under-fueling, long before your cycle disappears
For any woman increasing her training volume, whether that’s ramping up for a first half marathon or simply adding more cardio on top of lifting, a missed period is the last warning sign, not the first. Watch for a shortening luteal phase, lighter cycles, or cycle length drifting outside your normal range. These are quiet signals that your body is deprioritizing hormonal function because energy availability hasn’t kept pace with output. The bone loss that follows chronic under-fueling is fast, and it does not fully reverse even after weight and cycles are restored.
The bottom line
You don’t need to pick a side between “cardio girl” and “meathead.” The science, the guidelines, and frankly the aging data all point the same direction: build the engine with cardio, build the car with resistance training, and load your hips, train your power, and eat enough to support whatever demand you’re placing on your body.
Strength is the floor everything else stands on. Don’t skip it, and don’t be afraid to push harder than you think you need to.
Train hard. Eat enough. Show up anyway.
