If you've been told that cardio is the only way to protect your heart and that lifting weights is just for building muscle looking good, you are operating on outdated science, and it could be costing you years of your life. Today I'm breaking down the research showing that strength training lowers blood pressure on par with medication, improves your cholesterol profile, and reduces your risk of dying from heart disease by up to 17%. You'll learn why your muscles are secretly your most powerful cardiovascular organ, how to structure your lifting to get a real cardio effect without stepping on a treadmill, and at the very end, a 10-second heart rate test you can do between sets that predicts cardiovascular health better than most labor. Find the hidden reason it doesn't work, and give you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Pape, and today we're gonna hit on conventional wisdom about cardio. Cardio is for your heart, and lifting weights is for your muscles. Two separate buckets, right? And if you're over 40 and you're thinking about longevity, the default advice is go for a walk, go for a jog, get on an elliptical, get your cardio in, do your heart healthy exercise, and then maybe lift a little on the side for bone density or whatever benefit, if it's even mentioned. I mean, I still see many, many articles that don't even mention lifting weights. They use the general term exercise. And the real problem with that framing is it is incomplete in a way that fundamentally limits your results. Because the research we have now, lots of research over the past decade, including a 2023 scientific statement from the American Heart Association, now confirms clearly that resistance training is safe, it's effective, it is an essential part of cardiovascular disease risk reduction. It's not optional, it's not secondary, it is essential. And yet, only 28% of adults meet the recommendation of strength training at least two days per week, which means that most people concerned about heart health, which we all should be, are ignoring one of the most powerful tools available. And as a side note, this tool is the most powerful for almost anything related to your health. So you kind of get the benefits regardless across the spectrum when you're lifting. The fix is almost too simple. You don't need a separate cardio program. You just have to adjust how you already lift to get those benefits. And you might not even have to do that. Now, as a quick tangent, one of our upcoming episodes, in fact, it might be as early as next week, is going to get into strength training along with endurance. Because we've had quite a number of listeners write in concerned that they shouldn't be doing cardio because there's some negative to it. And that is not the case either. So stay, you know, follow the show. We're going to talk about that next week. How do you incorporate both endurance if you enjoy it or you're competitive or whatever, along with your lifting? But today, this episode was inspired by a listener, Jack R, who said, quote, I'm a huge fan of the show and I listen to it on every run I go on. So what I want to hear is the differences between cardio and lifting in the long term. Which one overall can burn more fat? Which one is good for building more muscle? And how do they hold up over time? So, Jack, that's a great question. And again, you are also gonna want to listen to the upcoming show called something like strength training and endurance, you know, putting them together, something like that, because I haven't recorded it yet. But this one is dedicated to you, Jack. So we're gonna go over that and more. I'm gonna walk you through what lifting does for your heart, your blood vessels, your blood pressure, your cholesterol, your insulin sensitivity, and your longevity. We're gonna compare cardio and lifting head to head for fat loss, muscle building, and long-term sustainability, which is kind of what Jack asked about. And I'll show you how to program your training so you get the cardiovascular benefits from lifting without sacrificing your strength gains. So whether you are currently lifting or you're on the fence, I wanna change how you think about what heart healthy exercise actually means and really have lifting near the top of that list in your programming. And then if you stick around, I always have a cool tip at the end. Today I'm gonna share a simple 10-second test that you can do between your sets in the gym. And it's gonna give you a real-time snapshot of your cardiovascular fitness. You have to do it while you're working out, but then you can use it to track your heart health over time and see how it's improving. Super simple. I love stuff like that. All right, let's start with the single biggest risk factor for heart disease. And by the way, heart disease is the number one killer for men and women. So it's super important. The single biggest risk factor is actually blood pressure. This is where the evidence for strength training is strong enough that I wish it changed how every doctor talks to us about exercise, but you know, that's that's wishful thinking at the moment. So blood pressure, let's talk about it. Multiple studies, and these are meta-analysis, okay, big studies of studies, now confirm that regular strength training reduces resting blood pressure. Okay, now anybody who lifts weights has seen this happen. All my clients have seen this happen. It's pretty cool. In people who have hypertension, we're looking at systolic blood pressure drops around five to 10 millimeters of mercury and diastolic, so systolics on the top, diastolics on the bottom, of I think I have that right, of two to five milligrams or millimeters of mercury. So five to ten for systolic, two to five of diastolic. And a 2022 systematic review of 14 different trials found that lifting lowered systolic blood pressure by about nine and a half and diastolic by about five in hypertensive adults. So adults who have high blood pressure already, who have a mean age around 60. So older adults around 60 with high blood pressure. Now, to put that in perspective, that is comparable to what you would expect from a first-line blood pressure medication. And then younger adults in the analysis saw even larger improvements of around 13 systolic. Right. And this, so this is meaningful. This is important because it's meaningful. This could be the difference between needing your meds and not needing it. And again, I've coached many, many a client who got to come off their blood pressure meds because they're lifting weights now. And, you know, yes, they're doing the other things, but we're talking about lifting today. And certain types of resistance exercise are especially effective. And those aren't necessarily, that doesn't necessarily mean you have to incorporate them, but it could be that the way you lift efficiently includes them. And what do I mean? Isometric holds are one of the most effective methods for lowering blood pressure, but you also do isometric holds all the time when you're just lifting weights. So you don't have to do like wall sits or hand grip exercises per se if you're doing deadlifts. I mean, a deadlift is one of the most powerful isometric holds we have. And if you're using, you know, decent tempo and sometimes you're using pauses and things like that, you get plenty of isometric work. Now let's talk about blood vessels and endothelial function. All right. This is where this is the part a lot of people don't hear as much about when we talk about lifting. If you are using the way we like to lift, moderate to higher, you know, moderate rep ranges, but even up to higher rep ranges, like in a hypertrophy program, and you get this extra blood flow, it creates shear stress on the vessel wall. So your blood vessels have walls and there's stress on the walls. And that shear stress stimulates your endothelial cells to produce nitric oxide. And that causes your blood vessels to relax and dilate. And by the way, nitric oxide, you might have heard of that in the context of like pre-workouts and performance enhancers over the years as well. So this is a natural way to make your arteries more flexible and responsive, which is the opposite of arterial stiffness, right? Stiffness is one of the drivers of, again, heart disease, which the fancy term is atherosclerosis, and heart attacks. By the way, I'm not a doctor. This is not medical advice. This is this is what the evidence is telling us, and I'm sharing you what those relationships are. I'm not giving you medical advice here. The American Heart Association's 2023 statement I alluded to earlier recognized that resistance training has positive effects on endothelial function. And then a couple years later, since it was last year, 2025, there was a meta-analysis on older adults that found that circuit-based resistance training significantly reduced arterial stiffness alongside improvements in blood pressure. So, putting this together, your lifting sessions, yeah, they build muscle, but they also train your blood vessels to be more compliant and more efficient, which is not a surprise because lifting is a hermetic stressor that causes a lot of adaptations, right? We know it adapts bone and muscle, but it's also adapting your blood vessels. Your cardiovascular system is adapting to those demands. And it does so the same way it does with aerobic exercise, but just through a slightly different mechanism. You know, and honestly, if you do heavy deadlifts, let's say, and watch your heart rate, you'll see that you are also getting some cardio, even though it's a much shorter bursts and small amounts of time. So that covers sort of the plumbing, the pressure, the pipes in your body. Now let's talk about what's flowing through them because strength training changes the chemistry of your blood in ways that help reduce heart disease risk. So this is pretty cool. Let's talk about that. All right. Cholesterol and lipids. So there is, there's still this perception that the only way you can improve your cholesterol is through cardio or also through food, right? And we do know that reducing saturated fat, for example, seems to be correlated with that, maintaining a healthier body weight, et cetera. But there's also evidence related to lifting. There was a systematic review in diabetes patients specifically that found that regular resistance training increased by quite a bit the what we call the protective or good cholesterol HDL. It reduced LDL, the harmful cholesterol, and then it lowered triglycerides, which is also a good result. And again, they were statistically and clinically meaningful. And we know that in older adults, which have been studied quite a bit when it comes to blood pressure, there are significant HDL increases on the order of like two to five milligrams per deciliter. Right. So that's two to five. It's not huge, but it's meaningful. And LDL drops of five to 10 after a few months of consistent training, independent of other variables. Aerobic training, so this is like what we traditionally call cardio, probably does have a slight edge in raising HDL if you do it a lot. But if you combine lifting with some cardio, that tends to produce the best overall lipid profile. So this is one of the my nods to the fact that we don't want to just not do cardio, but that lifting needs to be part of the equation. Some of the other things we find improve in studies about resistance plus resistance training plus cardio when adults are overweight is the lowering of Apo B, right? That's a marker, marker of lip light lipoproteins. And the improvement was more than either of those by themselves, either cardio or resistance training. Right. So that's cholesterol and lipids, you get a benefit. Then insulin sensitivity, we've talked about a lot in the show. And this is where lifting really, really is a huge signal. The value of having and building muscle, right? And stick with me because this one is just so important. When you think of your muscle, can when you contract skeletal muscle, it's a sink for glucose. Having the muscle is a sink for glucose. So when you lift in the gym, your muscles are pulling that sugar out of your blood, essentially, and using it for fuel. And because lifting builds more tissue over time, you're increasing your baseline capacity to handle carbohydrates. And we had a whole episode about carbs just recently. A meta-analysis found that adding resistance exercise to your routine, this was in middle-age and older adults with type 2 diabetes, led to significant drops in HBA1C. That's the long-term blood sugar marker. And that's compared to no exercise, significant drops, independent, at least partly independent of weight loss. And I say partly because a lot of these studies, the problem is once you start having lifting weights and living a better lifestyle, you end up losing some weight, oftentimes not on purpose. So it's hard to tease apart the variables sometimes. But regardless, this is a huge deal for us, especially the over 40 population, because insulin resistance is one of those things that creeps up with age. It's one of the central drivers of metabolic syndrome, right? That's like pre diabetes, where we have high blood pressure, poor cholesterol, elevated blood sugar, extra abdominal fat, and just one hour of strength training per week, even that minimum dose was associated with a 29% lower risk of developing metabolic syndrome. So again, your muscle tissue isn't just there for strength and physique, it is a metabolic organ. I love, I want you to think about that. It's a metabolic organ. It's also kind of an endocrine organ, which is hormones. It regulates your blood sugar, it regulates your insulin levels, your inflammation. The more of it you have, the more resilient your metabolism is. All right, so now all this ties into body composition and visceral fat, which is a pillar of everything we discuss on this show. And this is where we can directly answer Jack's three questions. Thank you, Jack, for the questions. Another shout out to you. The first one, which burns more fat? All right, in the short term, cardio burns a few more calories per session than lifting. In the short term, like if you just take a session in isolation of let's say 30 minutes or an hour. But resistance training changes your body composition in ways that makes fat loss more sustainable over time. And you tend to burn more calories, having more muscle, and you tend to carry a little bit more body weight with more muscle, all of which burns more calories that far exceeds what you're burning just from doing cardio. Not to mention the adaptations you could have with cardio. It's a separate topic. There was a 2024 systematic review of people with overweight and obesity that found that resistance training during a calorie deficit preserves lean mass with moderate certainty and improves fat loss with high certainty. Now, none of that's a surprise to us, but it means that when you're in a deficit, lifters lose just as much or more fat as cardio-only exercises, but they keep their muscle. And that matters massively because that is what we want to keep. We don't want to lose muscle. More muscle means all the things we talk about: higher resting metabolic rate, burning more calories, uh, better health, better everything else. And so, going back to what I said earlier, if you can combine some aerobic and resistance exercise, you're probably gonna have the best combination of fat loss and fitness gains than either alone. And when we talk cardio, by the way, we're gonna talk more about it in the next uh episode in the episode about endurance. Walking is a fantastic form of cardio. So you can be highly successful with all of this if you just move and walk a lot, which is honestly a thing that many people lose as they age. You know, it's often not hormones and perimetabas and all this other stuff. It's you're not moving enough. And I don't mean exercise or cardio, I just mean walking. Okay, so that's one question about which burns more fat. So I hope I answered that for you. So over the long term, you're probably gonna burn more fat having muscle, but doing both training and endurance. All right, now which builds more muscle? That one's really straightforward. Obvious answer resistance training, of course. Just cardio does not provide mechanical tension. It doesn't provide stress on your muscle skeletal system and beyond, you know, beyond a beginner doing it for the first week who doesn't move or something like that. It doesn't provide progressive overload, nothing that you need to stimulate muscle growth. All right. So a cardio-only approach, you are going to lose lean mass, and that is just not good. So never ever would I recommend cardio only. I do recommend lifting predominantly with complementary cardio, which is strategic and it depends on your goals and what you like. The other question Jack asked is how do they hold up over time? And this is more of a sustainability thing, and it looks like lifting does have an advantage. There was some research in Harvard that found men who did 20 minutes of daily weight training gain less abdominal fat over a multi-year period than men who did the same amount of cardio exercise. And that's because lifting prevents the loss of muscle, which helps keep your fat gain at bay. It dampens your fat gain and it maintains your metabolic rate as you age. So then when you look over five, 10, or 20 years, strength training helps build a body that's easier to maintain. That's what I mean by sustainability. When we think long-term, the best exercise routine is the one you can follow for life. And because lifting builds such compounding returns, we often see people stick with it for life as part of their identity. Whereas cardio kind of ebbs and flows and it depends. It depends. Even walking, I find some people struggle to do that and make it part of their identity as easily, I'll say, as lifting. But of course, it depends on the person. So, Jack, the short answer for fat loss, you want to combine both, but definitely make sure you're lifting. For muscle, you want to lift. And for the long game, you want to lift as the foundation, but be always moving to keep your health. So, doing both is obviously an important conclusion here. Now, we often associate fat loss with cardio, but resistance training is really effective at improving your body composition and helping with your visceral fat, the abdominal fat, that's the dangerous fat around your organs, that also tends to drive inflammation and insulin resistance. And many of us don't like it visually either. There's a study in midlife women that found that 15 weeks of strength training curbed the increase in visceral fat that would come with perimenopause and menopause. That's pretty cool. All right. So when you can reduce your visceral fat, you're gonna lower the inflammatory cytokines that are circulating in your body. That's worse one source of inflammation. You're also gonna reduce free fatty acids that then damage your blood vessel walls. And now you improve the metabolic markers we've been discussing. All right, so we've covered blood pressure, blood vessels, cholesterol, insulin, visceral fat, all improved by lifting. But what about actual cardiovascular fitness? What about VO2max, the metric that predicts how long you live, supposedly? Can weights improve that? And the answer is yes. Yes. But how you program your sessions determines how much. And of course, it depends on why you're trying to increase your VO2 max, because a lot of people think you have to increase it way more than you do necessarily to get the benefits. And there's some issues with VO2 Max on the calculation side that we can get into. Now, speaking of programming, if you're trying to prioritize lifting or add in endurance work or combine both, or even prioritize endurance but still lift, and you're doing it for whatever reason heart health, body composition, longevity, enjoyment, that's exactly what Fitness Lab is designed to handle. Fitness Lab is my AI-powered coaching app. It gives you personalized daily guidance. Like it tells you what to do every day under your nutrition, your training, your biofeedback, your sleep, your movement, all of that adapted to your goals and what is happening to your body. And what I mean by that, this is super powerful. The app adjusts to how you want to train and what you want to train. So if you want to add circuit style sessions or endurance or runs aside alongside your lifting, it can account for that and it can create activities for you. If you're recovering from an illness or surgery or you just want to focus on building strength, it will meet you at where you are and change your program mid-stride for that. And right now, through February 17th, the day after this episode is out, I believe, you can still get 20% off with our winter sale at witsandweights.com slash app. After that, it goes back to full price. That's witsandweights.com slash app. The link is in the show notes. Check it out. All right, I want to talk about now cardiovascular or cardiorespiratory fitness. Here, this is this is like the true cardio fitness that we often talk about. And before we do, just a reminder, I want you to stick around to the end because I'm going to give you real quick heart rate recovery tests. It takes 10 seconds that you can do starting with your next gym session and start tracking that, in my opinion, is going to help you assess your cardiovascular health. And you won't even need a lot of what we're going to talk about in this section anyway. But some of you really like a lot of data, and I get it, I'm a nerd like that too. So let's do it. All right. VO2 Max. VO2 Max, this is your body's maximum oxygen uptake. And it it is, it does seem to be a very strong predictor of heart health and all-cause mortality. And yes, aerobic training cardio is still the most, I'll say, efficient way to improve it, especially if you want to get a really high number. And and I've done a VO2 max test and it's brutal. So I know you have to have really good cardiovascular fitness. A 2024 meta-analysis of 38 RCTs, that's randomized controlled trials, in middle-aged and older adults, showed that aerobic training raised VO2 max by about 1.8 milliliter per kilogram per minute. That's the unit. Okay. It's if you want to dissect that, it's the volume relative to your weight, relative to time, more than resistance training. So 1.8. Okay. So if you're trying to maximize VO2 max, then classic endurance training does have the edge. There's no argument there, and I'm gonna give Cardio a point on that one. But resistance training improves VO2 max in a way that we don't often hear about. A meta analysis in adults over 60 found an average VO2 max increase of about 1.9 from resistance training alone. And in middle-aged diabetic patients, resistance training significantly improved VO2 peak alongside other health markers. And this is mainly because when you are doing a moderate amount of volume, maybe shorter rest periods, you're working on that work capacity, you're getting your heart rate up as you lift, you're still lifting your heart rate. You're still placing intermittent cardio demand on your body. And over time, that repeated stimulus is going to enhance your heart, its ability to pump efficiently, your muscles' ability to use oxygen, your VO2 max is going to go up. Period. The clear winner, though, and you're going to hear me repeat myself on this, is combining both. A randomized control trial in overweight adults found that 12 weeks of combined aerobic and resistance exercise improved VO2 max by 13%, way more than either alone. And it concluded that a combination of aerobic and resistance training is probably optimal for comprehensive fitness and body composition improvements in aging populations. So again, no surprise there that a hybrid approach could be helpful. Now, some people are doing it without even realizing it, like some of the circuit weight training where you do exercises sequentially with minimal rest, that ends up being like an endurance exercise, right? It ends up being a form of cardio and then it boosts VO2 max. So it doesn't matter how you're doing it, is the point. If you're building strength as a priority and holding muscle as a priority, there are ways that you can work out and things you incorporate in your lifting sessions that will already boost your cardio fitness and your VO2 max when combined with walking that are more than you ever need, but not necessarily as much as you want if your goal is to get that number even higher. So that's the nuance. Now, for longevity, all right, the big picture on this, if blood pressure and cholesterol improve, and that's super convincing that we've already talked about. We also see just the big number of mortality that adults who do strength train have a 15% lower risk of dying from any cause. That's all cause mortality, and a 17% lower risk of cardiovascular disease events compared to those who do not use resistance training. And much of that reduction kicks in at as little as 30 minutes of lifting per week. So there is a minimum effective dose that is like a step change versus not lifting at all. That's why it's so powerful to just start where you're at and do it, right? Just because you're not lifting two or three or four days a week, lift 30 minutes a week versus nothing, you're gonna get a lot of benefits. And then when you combine that with aerobic exercise, it's additive. It's additive. So there was an NIH study where older adults who did both had more than 40% lower 10-year mortality than those who did neither. And then they outperformed those who only did one or the other as well. And the reason is the two forms of exercise, they affect your health through some overlapping but distinct pathways. It's kind of like a Venn diagram where you have two circles slightly overlapping. So there's different mechanisms, and the thing in the middle benefits from both. Well, cardio builds your cardiac efficiency and your ability to transport oxygen. Lifting, of course, preserves muscle mass, strength, and functional independence. And that's independently linked to survival. And then muscle strength is a predictive mortality as well, sometimes more than aerobic fitness. And the only way to increase that, of course, is resistance training. So now the question becomes practical. How do you set up your lifting to capture these benefits in the most efficient way? So you don't feel like, oh my God, I have to lift four days a week and I have to do four sessions of cardio week or something like that. Because that is not the case. Or else I'd have no clients and I myself would not enjoy this. So we've spent three segments putting the Cardios King advice under the microscope, showing you the ways that lifting improves your cardiovascular system, your blood pressure, blood vessels, cholesterol, insulin, visceral fat, VO2 max, mortality, just such overwhelming evidence. All right. Share this episode with anybody who needs to hear this, by the way. The fix is almost annoyingly simple. You don't need a separate cardio program. You don't. And I say need because there's want is a different thing. You don't need to add 45 minutes on the treadmill after your lifting session. You have to adjust how you lift and make sure you walk. And then beyond that, it's kind of a bonus, or depending on what your goals are. And I'm an engineer. I think of it as like you've got one system, that's your body. You could either run two or three programs to improve it, which takes two or three times the amount of time, or you can modify one thing to hit everything simultaneously. So we're gonna do that. So the first and simplest lever is honestly rest periods. Now, this is interesting because I I have two, I'm of two minds. All right. I would say traditional strength programs where you're purely trying to build strength with big compound lifts like squats and deadlifts, you're gonna want to rest enough to get all those reps. We're talking three to five minutes per set between sets. And sometimes you don't get much of a cardiovascular stimulus doing that, doing it that way in terms of total volume of cardiostimulus, right? You you might, your heart rate might spike when you do the rep, the reps, but then it drops. So one of the hacks is once you're going to a more of a hybrid like strength and hypertrophy program, getting some exercises in there that limit your rest intervals to a shorter time period, like 60 seconds, or even using supersets and rest pause and things like that. Now, you don't want to do with everything, but what I'm suggesting is that for some of your exercises in a workout, usually more the isolation stuff toward the end, using short rest periods could be a way to jack up your heart rate and get a little bit of endurance and cardio in while you're lifting weights. Why not? Right? It's super efficient. It's super efficient. Now, we've talked about conjugate on this program before, where you have two of your four days are dynamic effort. And when I've done conjugate before without bands or chains, but just with a bar, the the way that you do it is through very explosive, concentric movements and very short rest periods. So, and and you, so and part of it is because you're trying to build work capacity, right? So even powerlifters do do this. Powerlifters do want to have higher work capacity as well. And powerlifters today are much more fit that I'll say than they used to be, and a little bit leaner, right? They don't carry as much excess weight, et cetera. Um, and there have been studies that look at like the circuit protocols with short rest, and they they definitely improve VO2 max. And of course, it's kind of obvious now based on what we talked about, because it becomes an aerobic exercise. Now you know what you're thinking, right? If I cut my rest periods, my strength will suffer. And that is kind of true if you're doing heavy compound work near your max, but that even then you can periodize. You can have days for heavy work and you can have lighter, I'll say circuit style or superset style or hypertrophy style work. In fact, I have a program or two in physics university that's designed on that rotational structure. You might have a strength and a hypertrophy and kind of a hybrid day all in one week, which kind of serves these other goals at the same time. They're very efficient. And then you're not choosing between strength and cardio, you're scheduling them both in pretty efficiently. So rest periods is definitely an easy hack to think about. The second thing is actually compound movements themselves, right? The big squat, deadlift, press, rows, exercises that use large muscle groups and multiple joints are going to spike your heart rate the most. They just are. I mean, I used to do CrossFit and my heart rate would get way up, you know, like to 160s, 170s, whatever. The spikes came down over time as I got more fit, of course. But when I do really heavy deadlifts at 80% of my max, same thing happens. Same thing happens. Now, I might not be doing 20 of them for 10 minutes, like in CrossFit, right? And that's the difference of the volume, but you get a spike. If just look at your next, do a heavy set of squats and measure your heart rate and see what kind of demand you're getting for that. It's massive. And anybody who's done a decent amount of reps on heavy squats knows what the heck I'm talking about. In fact, it's why we sometimes fear doing like a set of eight when you get really strong and you're using heavy weights. A lot of people are like, oh yeah, I'd rather do eight than five. No, no, no, you wouldn't. Not always, trust me. Right? And then you're gasping, your heart's pounding, and you're you haven't even done any cardio, but it feels like it. So you definitely build work capacity that way because of the mechanisms we talked about, it we talked about. So if you're just lifting in a sort of traditional way with the big movements and then using isolation exercises to complement it with the dynamic work, with the superset stuff, with the short rest periods, you're gonna get a really big benefit for that. All right, the next one I want to mention is kind of related to what we already talked about, and this is more of the rep range. So if you use moderate or higher rep ranges, you're just naturally going to have a little bit more endurance training built in. That's just what it comes down to. It doesn't have to be a circuit training or superset per se, but just the fact that you're doing a little bit lighter work for, let's say, 15 or 20 reps. I mean, if you're leg pressing for 15 to 20 reps, you're gonna get a cardio benefit as you do that. And then you could add finishers to that. You can add, I don't care, kettlebell swings or sled pushes, farmer carries, those kinds of things people like to do, rather than a separate quote unquote cardio session. If you've never done a 50-yard sled push, I recommend it. It will feel like a sprint and your quads are gonna remind you about it the next day for sure. Okay. Then we have frequency. You don't have to just start going to the gym way more than you do to get the heart benefits. I still am a firm believer of find the minimum effective dose, increase the volume a little bit if you can fit it in. And, you know, not much more than that. In other words, for the most of us that have regular lives with busy lives, and we're not trying to compete or anything like that, I would say three full body or four or five split style program, you know, uh sessions a week for most people are gonna work and where you mix in some of the elements we've already talked about. Okay. When you do have off days, that is where extra walking or cycling or some form of cardio like that, or even sprinting, can add to your cardiovascular load without competing with your lifting. We're gonna do a whole episode about this coming up very, very soon. So remember to follow this show so you get that episode. So a very practical template would be three days of training a week, say Monday, Wednesday, Friday, that have this built-in cardio stimulus, two to three days of longer walks. You're you should be walking every day anyway, but I'm saying, like on the days when you don't lift, have something more intentional built in. It could be rucking with a rucksack, could be going for a hike, could be going for a bike ride, things like that. Could be putting a sprint or two in there as well. And that will cover your strength, your cardio, your daily movement, and you don't even have to add extra cardio per se, right? Like even in the off days, it could just be walking. So if you're time constrained, this is a really efficient approach. So I want to kind of wrap up here by talking about a concept called physical reserve. I want you to think of it like the gap between your maximal capacity and the effort required by your daily activities. Climbing stairs, carrying groceries, playing with your kids or grandkids, getting off the floor. Right. When you have a low physical reserve, those everyday tasks are gonna be closer to your max. And that's where, and you look, some of you that are listening that are heavier, that are overweight, or maybe used to be, maybe you aren't GOP1s, it doesn't matter if you how you've lost weight, but you know what it is, right? You just out of breath, your heart rate spikes, your blood pressure goes up, you're just under stress from basic living. I don't want to see you living that way. I don't want to see people living that way. It's it's very sad. I see it all the time. It's it's a huge percentage of our population. And that is a cardiovascular risk factor that is just right there hiding in plain sight. And it's visible, it's visible, right? I'm not judging somebody because they're overweight. I am sad for them because I know that they care about their own their ability to do the things they want to do in life. And I think this all correlates with each other. And and what we talk about on the show will absolutely get you there. When you build muscle and strength through lifting, you expand that reserve. Right? That's why I think it's so important. It's not the cardio loan, isn't necessarily gonna do that. The things that used to tack your system, tax your system that are physical become easier. And your heart then isn't working as hard during your daily life, your blood pressure stays lower throughout the day. You're giving your heart system more margin. Okay, it's like over-engineering your body so it handles loads without the stress. That's what we want. And so, and then this matters more as we get older. Once you hit 40, 45, 50, you're the default, the default is losing muscle and losing strength and gaining fat and gaining belly fat, watching that reserve shrink until normal activities then are constantly stressing your heart, which is why people get heart disease and why heart disease is the number one killer for men and women. So the investment you make in training isn't just about the superficial things or the time in the gym. It's one of the most important investments in your life. So, whatever time it takes, which it shouldn't take very long if you listen to this show, we want you to be efficient about it, it could be the most important time you invest, other than say, though, the time in your relationships and maybe your sleep. Right? So then your heart doesn't have to work as hard to support you through everything else you do. And that is, I'll say, the real argument for lifting as cardiovascular medicine, along with the other forms of movement we talked about. All right, so that's like the main thrust of this episode. Now I'm right after this, I'm gonna share that 10-second heart rate recovery test I mentioned. It's a really practical tool to give you immediate feedback. You could start tracking it as you train. If you want to put that into practice, anything we talked about today, with personalized guidance, but without hiring a one-on-one coach, check out Fitness Lab. This app is so powerful, guys. We're getting amazing feedback on how it listens to you, helps you through hard times, adapts to your goals. What whether that's building strength, losing fat, improving your blood markers, all of the above, it gives you tasks to do every day and it gives you coaching on exactly what's going on so you don't guess. And it pulls in your data to help with that. So it's 20% off now through February 17th. Go to witsandweights.com slash app. Link is in the show notes. That's witsandweights.com slash app for 20% off. All right, here's the 10-second heart rate recovery test. Here's a simple test. It takes 10 seconds and tells you more about your cardiovascular fitness than your resting heart rate does. At the end of your heartest set in the gym, that set that leaves you breathing really heavy, check your heart rate. So if you have a wearable, you could do that, or you can do it manually by counting your pulse for six seconds and multiplying it by 10. Then I want you to be totally still. Sit or stand still for one minute and check it again. So check your heart rate right after the heavy set, check it again a minute later. That difference is your heart rate recovery, your HR. So if your heart rate drops by 12 or more beats in that minute, that's considered normal. If it's less than 12, then based on research, this is a marker of reduced cardiovascular fitness and increased mortality risk. So you want it to be at least 12. And then over time, as your fitness improves from lifting and moving and being, you know, having this lifestyle, you're you should see that number go up. You might start at 15 and eventually get to 25 or maybe 30. It is one of the most responsive fitness markers available. I don't think I've ever talked about it on the show. It's so easy. You don't need equipment, you don't need blood work. It's called heart rate recovery. Just try it at your next session. Pick the most demanding set, measure your peak heart rate, wait a minute, measure how much it dropped, write it down, do it again every few weeks and see what the trend looks like. All right. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, every rep you do isn't just building muscle. It is building a stronger heart, healthier blood vessels, a longer life. I'm Philip Cape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.