As a hybrid athlete, you know the drill—balance is everything. Alternating between cardio and weightlifting days, hybrid athletes commonly split their training routine into separate sessions to maximise effort, recovery and long-term progress, ensuring they can focus on each training goal effectively. But what if you were to tackle both in one session? It’s efficient, but could be a recipe for fatigue, right?
Maybe not.
Blending Strength & Endurance Training
Balancing both strength and endurance training in one training session is no easy feat. It’s well understood that combining both cardio and resistance training in a single training session can negatively impact performance for one, or both aspects of the training session. Especially by the time you get to the second half of that session, your body’s feeling the burn, and fatigue begins to set in.
However, what if there was a simple way to push through that performance dip and get more out of condensed hybrid training sessions? A new study suggests that the answer might be simpler than you think: caffeine.
The Study: Can Caffeine Help?
In a new study, 14 resistance-trained men were put through six different workout conditions under three supplement scenarios:
- Control – No supplement at all.
- Placebo – A non-caffeinated supplement.
- Caffeine – A dose of caffeine (6 mg/kg body weight).
They completed resistance training sessions solo, as well as back-to-back with aerobic exercises. The goal? To figure out if caffeine could improve performance—measured by total reps, inter-set reps, lifting volume, and how hard the workout felt (Rate of Perceived Exertion, or RPE).
The Findings: How Caffeine Changed the Game
The results confirmed what many hybrid athletes already know: combining cardio and strength in the same session isn’t easy. Total reps, inter-set reps, and lifting volume were all lower during concurrent training, and participants felt like the workout was tougher.
But here’s where caffeine stepped in:
- With caffeine, total reps and training volume went up.
- Performance in both the first and second sets improved compared to the control and placebo groups.
- While the challenge of hybrid training still showed (performance during hybrid training was lower than resistance alone), caffeine helped minimise the decline.
What Does This Mean for You?
Some hybrid athletes prefer to keep their strength and cardio training on separate days to maximise their performance. But sometimes life gets busy, or you might prefer the challenge of combining both in a single workout.
This study shows that adding caffeine to your pre-workout routine could be the key to getting through those tough sessions without sacrificing too much strength or endurance.
By boosting total reps and lifting volume, and lessening the perceived difficulty of the workout, caffeine can help you push through the fatigue that comes with switching from cardio to weights in a single session. So, next time you’re thinking about tackling both types of training in one workout, maximising your efforts in both strength and cardio might be a little easier with the right fuel in your system—and caffeine could be exactly what you need to rise to the challenge.
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