I have a feeling that I may be majoring in the minors and so am looking for a reality check. I’m training in what now seems to be called a “hybrid athlete” style – I’m doing 4 lifting session and 3-4 road biking sessions per week. Both are structured and following specific training plans. I’ve built a schedule that either has the sessions on separate days or one in the morning and then one in the evening in an effort to avoid the interference effect.
I’m 45 and have been lifting seriously for more than 20 years. My most recent DEXA scan puts my FFMI at just a touch over 25 at 13.6% bf. I realize 25 isn’t a hard limit for natural lifters, but all of this together means that my chances of gaining much appreciable muscle mass at this stage are pretty darn low. That’s fine – my main goal is to keep what I’ve got and slowly increase cardiovascular fitness.
With all that background, does it make sense to worry about the interference effect? There will probably be some days when life happens and I need to lift and cycle in one big block. While that’s not ideal from a hypertrophy standpoint, I’m thinking I probably shouldn’t worry much about it and I’d probably even be fine building a schedule that had lifting and cycling back to back on a regular basis.
Yes, recovery is good enough. The interference effect I’m talking about is the negative impact concurrent training has on hypertrophy. I should have clarified that in my original post.
I’ve always assumed the body would gravitate toward holding less muscle as an adaptation so that there’s less mass to move around.
And that there’s some neural adaptations that shift toward faster firing rates and greater muscle recruitment with strength work, and slower firing rates and lower muscle recruitment with aerobic work. The one you do more is the direction it would go, so doing them both limits you in both directions.
Personally, I think a lot of these types of conclusions come down to trying to maximize a specific outcome… and very few of us actually want or need to maximize any specific component of fitness.
In this example, you don’t actually need to maximize your explosive strength gains because you’re not looking to compete on an Olympic platform as the culmination of you entire life’s work. Similarly, that Olympic athlete is willing to sacrifice his cardiac health (at least for that time period) to try and get that medal.
Point being, even if there is some interference effect, it doesn’t mean you don’t make any gains in qualities trained (much less see regression). It could mean we don’t see that absolute maximum progression in any specific capacity trained. For nearly all of us, that’s totally fine.
That is very interesting – the most recent research I had seen on this issue was that the interference effect impacted hypertrophy when lifting and aerobic work was done in the same session and even that the effect was not localized. I’ll have to give this meta-analysis a read.
I have DEXA scan results going back to the fall of 2020. As I have gotten more serious with my cycling, I have seen a loss of lean mass in my legs. I’ve also lost some lean mass overall, which I was expecting since I’ve lost substantial body fat over the course of the last few years. But the lean mass loss in my legs has been greater than my overall loss of lean mass. This despite the fact that I am able to train my legs harder now than I was in the past (my knees have gotten a lot better over the last ~18 months). I may be experiencing some fiber type shifting as a result of all the cycling I’ve been doing.