Should I Do HIIT After Weight Training?


Should-I-Do-HIIT-After-Weight-Training

HIIT (high intensity interval training) is a great form of cardio as it can burn a ton of calories in a short time.

Some of the most common questions I get regardig cardio is “when should I do HIIT?” and “Is it better to do my HIIT session before or after my weight lifting session?” Well, this is something I’ve wondered myself, so I decided to put my nose to the grindstone to find the answer to these questions.

Here’s what I came up with:

Should I do HIIT after weight training? Yes, if you’re doing HIIT it’s recommended to place it after your weight training session. For optimal results you should do HIIT appart from your weight lifting session entirely. The best time for HIIT seems to be at least 6 hours after your weight lifting session, but preferably placed on another day completely.

I think that people get very uncertain about cardio since there’s so much noice out there. Some say do this, others say do that.

In this post I want to sort it out straight. I’ll do so by cover why it’s recommended that you place your HIIT cardio appart from your lifting, why HIIT is beneficical and how to perform HIIT.

Let’s go.

What is HIIT?

First of all, let’s nail the definition of HIIT.

HIIT stands for High Intensity Interval Training and is a form of cardio where you’re doing quick bursts (intervals) of work accompanied with rest in between. This rest can be active or passive.

HIIT cardio raises your heart rate a lot during the intervals and then reduces it slightly during the rest. This leads to quick gains in cardiovascular fitness and some types of HIIT also has the potential to build muscle since it’s highly anaerobic.

A potential drawback of HIIT is that it requires a lot of recovery once you’re done, especially when compared to the counterpart low intenisty cardio.

The Benefits of HIIT

what-is-HIIT-training

A lot of people looking to build an aesthetic looking lean and muscular physique skip the cardio, either because it’s hard and tough or out of the fear that it might impact gains negatively.

But, even though it’s tough, when HIIT is done right it’s very beneficial while it might actually be positive to your strength and muscle gains.

Here’s a list of the benefits:

1. HIIT can burn a lot of calories in a short time

Researchers have seen that HIIT burns 25-30% more calories than other forms of exercise for each time unit.

2. Keeps your fat burning processes on

HIIT helps keep your fat oxidation ready. This is great both if your goal is to cut down to a low body fat percentage, but also when bulking to build muscle.

By keeping your fat burning process on while bulking more of your surplus calories will go towards muscle repair and recovery instead of body fat. Furthermore, you’ll have a n easier time transition into a cutting phase if you have your fat burning processes is active and ready.

3. HIIT can lead to muscle gain

In addition to helping with fat loss, HIIT can also help increase muscle growth in certain individuals.

The individuals who can build more muscle with HIIT are mostly beginners who’ve just started lifting. For more advanced lifters it doesn’t seem that HIIT leads to increased muscle growth.

Weight training is still the “golden standard” when it comes to building muscle, but HIIT can still support small amounts of muscle growth.

4. HIIT improves cardiovascular health

Doing HIIT cardio trains your heart, lungs and blood vessels better than what strength training do.

It improves the flow of oxygen throughout your body, lower your blood pressure and cholesterol, and reduce your risk for heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, and some kinds of cancer.

5. HIIT will make you feel more energized

This is something I think is connected to the health aspect of doing cardio.

In the beginning of my fitness journey I didn’t do any cardio. All I did was watching my diet and strength trained. Even though this approach worked, as you can see in my transformation video, one thing I learned recently was that I lacked a lot of daily energy back then.

Here’s how I learned that:

When I began PT school a few months ago, I started doing cardio twice per week with my class. And this had me feel so much more energized.

I feel more productive and alert during the days, and best of all my sleep quality went up immensely. This is a very positive benefit, since sleep is one of the most important factors when it comes to maximizing muscle growth.

So, as you can see, there’s a lot of benefits of implementing HIIT training in your regimen. With that said though, if you want to see great results on your physique it’s important that you set your training up correctly:

Why You Should Ideally Spread Out Your Weight Lifting & HIIT Sessions

Doing strength training and cardio in the same session seems to be suboptimal for gains.

This was shown in a study by Robineau et al where they looked at whether sprinting after full body intense workouts with a recovery time of 0, 6, or 24 hours between strength and HIIT sequences influences the responses to a combined training program.

The group doing their sprint intervals directly after strength training gained less strength than the other three groups, but there were no differences in strength gains between the strength-only group and the two groups resting at least six hours between their strength training and their sprint intervals.

So, resting at least 6 hours between sessions seems to be optimal for strength adaptations if doing combined resistance and HIIT training on the same day.

Also, a recent meta-analysis from 2017 by Murlasits et al showed that, if you need to do cardio on the same day, then doing it after lifting is better for strength improvements compared to doing it before.

Use Low Impact Cardio Types

The type of endurance training that are being used seems to significantly affect the magnitude of gains in strength and muscle mass.

A meta-analysis of 21 studies done by Wilson et al showed that resistance training concurrently with running, but not cycling, resulted in significant decrements in both hypertrophy and strength. 

This seems to be because running is much more disruptive of the muscular system with a movement that is also very nonspecific to strength training.

During running there’s such a large eccentric portion, where every step causes eccentric shocks that are known to cause a lot of muscle damage. With running the stress on the legs would simply be too large, making recovery harder, which would ultimately result in decreased strength training performance and muscle mass.

While contrarily, cycling has nearly no eccentric portion at all, meaning less total stress, while it is also more similar to a squat or leg press movement.

This means that cycling done in combination with resistance training adds just enough training volume so that the body can still recover, while also doing so through a longer range of motion that is very specific to squatting or leg pressing.

What’s also worth mentioning is that, if for some reason you are not seeking to add a lot of muscle mass to your legs, but seeking to really build your upper body, then running might still be a viable option, since it mainly stresses your legs.

However, this would only be viable as long as the total amount of volume from doing running in combination with upper body training don’t get too high so that you can’t recover on a full body systemic level.

So, in summary. To get the best results possible spread out your strength and HIIT sessions by at least 6 hours. And focus your energy on low impact cardio modalities such as cycling, rowing and swimming. Try to avoid running since it’s very taxing to your legs, unless you don’t care about leg size, then it doesn’t matter that much.

How to Perform HIIT

What you can see below is my HIIT cardio recommendations that I first discussed in this post.

How Much HIIT to do:

  • 15 minutes 2-3 times per week.
  • HIIT can help promote strength and muscle growth if done moderately. But it can interfere with strength training if you do too much of it.

What Type of Modality to Choose When Doing HIIT?

  • Any modality except jogging and running.
  • Jogging and running is much more disruptive of the muscular system with a movement that is also very nonspecific to strength training. During running there’s a large eccentric portion which are known to cause a lot of muscle damage. When running the stress on the legs would simply be too large, making recovery harder, which would ultimately result in decreased strength training performance and muscle mass.
  • If your goal is to mainly build your upper body, then running is okay.

Here’s a Good HIIT Routine:

  • 3-5 minute warm-up
  • 30 seconds all out
  • Rest 30 seconds (complete rest or moving slowly)
  • 30 seconds all out
  • Rest 30 seconds
  • Repeat this for 15 minutes

Instead of doing HIIT routines like the one above, you could play sports 1-2 times per week on rest days for 20-30 minutes. Sports usually involve short periods of high intensity efforts with periods of walking or resting, so it’s very similar to HIIT.

A great benefit of playing sports is that they’re typically more enjoyable than normal “cardio” because you do something that’s not as repetitive, and you can have fun playing with your friends or a team in the meanwhile.

Related Questions

Is it OK to do HIIT every day? This depends a lot on your goals, training experience and recovery capacity. If your goal is to build the most amount of muscle that you can, then doing HIIT every day will be negative to your strength training recovery, which will then reduce your gains a bit. But if you’ve been training for a long time and can recover well, then you might be able to train HIIT every day.

If you’re in your beginner to intermediate stages I recommend that you stick to 2-3 HIIT sessions per week tops, placed separately from your lifting, as this will lead to the best gains in strength and muscle mass. From there you can slowly increase your HIIT sessions if you want to do more of them.

Does HIIT burn belly fat? Burning body fat is all about being in a calorie deficit. With that said though, HIIT can still help you burn more calories and hence that help you burn of your belly fat.

But you still need to control that you’re actually in a calorie deficit over time. Otherwise you might start to compensate for the calories burned when doing cardio by eating more, which is very common.

Now, one interesting benefit of HIIT is that once you’ve become fairly lean, around 10-12% body fat where your abs are starting to show, HIIT can help you burn off the last stubborn fat, usually placed over lower abs and hips.

HIIT effectively ramps up fat burning hormones such as adrenaline, noradrenaline, cortisol and growth hormone that activate an enzyme named Lipase.

Simply speaking, this enzyme enters your fat cells and effectively “pull out” your stored body fat and turn it into free fatty acids now circulating in your bloodstream. These FFA are ready to be used as energy by the body throughout the day.

Niklas Lampi

My name is Niklas Lampi and I work as a fitness writer, nutritional consultant and personal trainer. My favourite exercise is the bench press and my favourite food is pizza!

10 thoughts on “Should I Do HIIT After Weight Training?

  1. Great article! very informative! But just a couple of questions,

    1. What about HIIT workouts that involve resistance based circuits with very low resistance and high reps? Does this fall into the same category as running in that it’s a bit TOO high impact and can be detrimental to gains?

    2.. Are HIIT workouts that are circuits of about 10-12 exercises of 45 seconds ON 15 OFF too much?

    1. Thanks William,

      1. Those kind of circuits don’t fall under the same category. This is because they are very similar to lifting which means you work through a longer range of motion and activate muscle fiber in a way specific to lifting heavy weights. If anything you will build up type 1 fiber doing circuits that can help assist your muscular strength later on. Also, exercises done in circuits usually don’t cause as high eccentric impact as running do which allow the muscular system to recover fairly easy.

      2. Sounds a bit much, but this depends very much on how well trained you are (can you take a lot of training volume and still recover?) and also, what’s your goal? If your goal is to optimize strength and size then most volume should go to specific heavy lifting. But if you want to be generally more fit, then circuits are great addition to your training program.

      Hope this helps ☺️

  2. Great article! I weight train five days a week and mainly do HIIT on the day after that as part of a bodyweight type of training day based on pushups and ab exercises and then I get m HIIT in on the Assault Curve treadmill. I eat very healthy I feel that I’ve been putting on some pounds in my stomach area because I eat alot. I’ve started to dial down my portion sizes as well as adding in a second HIIT session on the Curve treadmill on a day after I do a deadlift/hip and back type of day. Do you think it would be ok to do the HIIT session at that time or should I switch to a more walking on an incline type of thing?

    1. Thank you Richard! How are you feeling on your HIIT the day after your deadlift/hip workout? If it were me I would definitely not feel recovered to do HIIT after such a workout, but if it’s working for you then sure. But for the best results I would rather do a lower intensity cardio session (such as walking, jogging slowly or biking etc) instead of the HIIT as that will lead to better recovery and in the end better results.

  3. Hi, thank you for this article!
    Just to make sure I understand it correctly. It would be ok to do HIIT on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays when my leg days (lifting) are Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays?

    1. It’s okay if you know or feel that you can recover from that much leg training. HIIT is very stressfull so it might leave you uanble to recover. I would recommend to start with less then build up over time.

  4. Thank you for this article Niklas! Question:
    HIIT that consists of 45 second work and 15 second rests of Alt. lunges, planks, in And outs, Mountain Climbers, Burpees etc. too much work to recover from? I train 6 days a week, push-pull-leg split. Also, I hope you’re safe from Covid-19.

  5. Truly a very well written article and incredibly educational. This helped a lot but I am still left with a couple questions. Im a guy whose on the young side and recently lost a lot of weight from a healthy diet and a ton of HITT and Cardio. I am now though looking to pack on some muscle this summer and hopefully get some serious gains. My plan is as follows: Monday Wednesday and Friday are all days that(in order) I do an intense upper body workout, an ab exercise and finish it off with a lower body HITT. Sunday I don’t do much other than a quick six minute ab workout and Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday are my rest days where all I do is walk 10000 steps. After extensively reading though that HITT can negatively affect muscle gains I got a little worried. I see that you say HITT can be done minimally six hours later, which is good, but Im wondering if my HITT qualifies as the type of cardio that if immediately done after a workout, it will damage gains or if its so much like resistance training that it won’t have that affect. Here is the HITT routine I plan on doing right after my upper body and ab workout: 30 secs Sprinting, 45 secs Jump Squats, 20 lunges each leg, 50 calf raises and then 1 min rest and repeat three more times. Do you think that doing this right after my upper body workout and ab session will impact my gains negatively? I really would prefer them to all be in the same session, but If it will effect my gains, I don’t want that. Let me know. Thanks so much.

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