3 Easy Ways to Maintain Muscle While Adding Cardio (Without Losing Your Gains)

Hello my friends! Today I want to talk about three easy ways to maintain muscle while you’re adding in cardio or during running training – maintaining your gains, so to speak. This addresses the mythical creature in the room: “Is cardio going to kill my gains and how do I prevent it from doing so?”

There are a few really easy things you can do in your training program to make sure you’re either maintaining or gaining muscle while also doing cardio simultaneously.

As always, cardio does not kill your gains. The volume and amount of cardio that would start negatively impacting your strength training is probably far more than most of you are doing. But today I want to talk about these few quick strategies to help you reduce any impact on your muscle size, appearance, or strength training during cardio-heavy phases.

Strategy #1: Do a Little Bit of Hypertrophy All the Time

This is my token saying, and I think people believe you need to reserve hypertrophy training for its own dedicated phase. While you can have an all-in strength phase (which is fantastic, especially if you’re a runner who hasn’t been lifting historically or anyone who hasn’t had a dedicated period focusing on building muscle), a really nice easy approach is to have a little bit of hypertrophy in your program all the time.

This means you’re always doing sets and reps in your accessory work – maybe more specifically – that are between 6-15 reps, always having that type of work in your training that’s directly focused on isolation or accessory movements.

A lot of your accessory work can be done in a way that also supports muscle growth and hypertrophy if you’re loading it heavy enough and making sure you’re going hard enough. Your accessory work during running phases can serve double duty: supporting your running while also maintaining and building muscle.

This approach ensures you’re always sending a muscle-building signal to your body, even when your main focus might be cardiovascular adaptation or race preparation.

Strategy #2: Maintain High Intensity, Reduce Volume

If you need to reduce the volume of your training because it’s getting too hard to recover from or you don’t have time for it, a big mistake people make is reducing their intensity. They start lifting lighter weights or doing an RPE 6 effort rather than an RPE 7-9 effort.

Keep that intensity high and reduce your sets instead.

I would rather you, during a hard, heavy running cycle, do two hard sets – get in, get out, and keep the intensity high. This is very similar to what we do in The Lyss Method programming when you have high training volume in other areas but still need to hit a little bit of everything with fewer training days.

My favorite rule of thumb is two hard sets. Keep the intensity at a higher percentage for your main bread-and-butter strength work. I usually like to err on the side of keeping lower reps with higher weight, so keeping that intensity up.

This is one way to decrease the volume and fatigue of your lifting while maintaining strength during high-cardio periods. Keeping your intensity high is crucial if you’re doing high volumes of cardio, in peak race training, or during a really intensive cardio cycle.

Some of that strength might decrease in those high-end strength ranges by nature, but if you’re keeping effort high and hard relative to what you currently can do, that will still benefit you and carry over into your long-term gains.

We want to make sure we’re always doing a little bit of hypertrophy, always targeting the muscles we want to develop or maintain, sticking within those rep ranges but keeping intensity high – not decreasing intensity but looking at decreasing sets instead.

We still want to go really hard in the sets we are doing, making them high-quality sets. A mistake a lot of people make with hybrid or concurrent training is thinking they need more and more – more sets, more reps, the program isn’t enough. Often what I see is people need to do more quality work in the volume they’re doing rather than needing more volume.

More isn’t always better – better is better.

Strategy #3: Dial in Your Nutrition

Something I think a lot of people do when adding cardio is either forgo focusing on eating enough protein (we know we need enough protein), but many of you might already be getting enough protein. The key is shifting your macronutrients to have a little bit more carbs to support the glycogen depletion from your cardio while also supporting your cardiovascular activity.

Carbs are also protein-sparing. This means that if your body is in a state of energy deficit and really needs something to metabolize for energy, it will only break down amino acids (protein) if needed. Your body doesn’t like to use protein for energy metabolism.

But if you have enough carbs available – whether in your muscle stores, liver stores, bloodstream, or within your diet throughout the day – that allows your body to use carbohydrates for energy metabolism during activity (lifting, running, cardio) and for the energy needed to repair your muscles from training.

This allows your protein to simply do its job: helping rebuild and repair within your body during recovery.

Adequate carbohydrate intake ensures you’re not inadvertently creating a situation where your body needs to break down muscle tissue for energy when you’re trying to maintain or build it.

How These Strategies Work Together

These are three strategies I make sure to implement when I’m in race training cycles. You might not be able to lift at the volume you always do because you might not be able to recover or have time for it, but you can still:

• Go hard with quality, intense sets

• Do accessory work for your full body in hypertrophy ranges

• Eat in a way that supports muscle maintenance and reduces protein turnover

You don’t need to save hypertrophy work only for certain times of the year – you can always be doing a little bit. Focus on hard, intense, quality sets that help develop muscle tissue, then eat in a way that supports that and reduces the burden of protein turnover that we potentially see with endurance exercise.

The Real Culprits Behind Muscle Loss

This isn’t to say that cardio will kill your gains, but poorly managed resistance training, skipping resistance training entirely, and undereating (or undereating in a way that supports your training) will kill your gains when you’re doing cardio and strength training side by side.

The issue isn’t the cardio – it’s usually:

• Completely dropping resistance training

• Reducing intensity instead of volume

• Not eating enough to support both types of training

• Abandoning muscle-building work entirely

Putting It All Together

These strategies seem simple, but they’re very powerful when it comes to maintaining your gains during endurance training or when adding cardio to your training routine.

In The Lyss Method, this approach is built right into our programming. Our hybrid training programs automatically adjust volume and intensity based on your training phase, ensure you’re always doing some hypertrophy work, and provide nutrition guidance that supports both your strength and cardio goals.

Whether you’re using our running programs that include strength maintenance protocols or our strength programs that account for additional cardio, we take the guesswork out of balancing these competing demands on your body.

The Bottom Line

Maintaining muscle while adding cardio doesn’t require complicated protocols or perfect timing. It requires:

1. Consistent hypertrophy work: Always include some 6-15 rep ranges in your accessory work

2. High-intensity, lower-volume strength training: Two hard sets beat four easy sets

3. Strategic nutrition: Adequate carbs to spare protein and support both types of training

Remember, the goal isn’t to maximize muscle growth during high-cardio phases – it’s to maintain what you have while you focus on your cardiovascular goals. Then, when you shift back to a strength-focused phase, you haven’t lost ground and can continue building from where you left off.

This is the beauty of a periodized, seasons-based approach to training. You’re not trying to maximize everything at once; you’re strategically maintaining one area while developing another, then cycling the focus over time.

Stop fearing cardio and start training smarter. Your gains can absolutely coexist with your cardiovascular goals – you just need to be strategic about how you approach both.