Cardio For Strength Athletes w/ Doug Larson, Dr. Mike Lane and Coach Travis Mash #848
Barbell Shrugged
Doug Larson
4.7 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 13 May 2026
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mash, and Dr. Mike Lane break down cardio for strength athletes, especially lifters who have spent years chasing numbers in the gym but have not deliberately trained their heart, lungs, and work capacity. The big idea is simple: the less time you have, the more intensity matters; the more time you have, the more room you have for lower-intensity zone 2 work. Doug explains why strength athletes in their 40s, 50s, and beyond need to consciously program cardio instead of assuming it will happen naturally, while Travis shares how adding consistent conditioning helped him feel better, get leaner, and maintain a higher level of performance without giving up strength training.
The conversation gets practical fast. Dr. Mike Lane explains how different forms of cardio create different adaptations, from left ventricle size and stroke volume to capillary density, mitochondrial improvements, blood pressure, cholesterol, and overall longevity. The team covers why sled pushes, assault bike sprints, rowing, hill sprints, carries, and high-resistance cycling can be great options for strength athletes because they drive the heart rate up without beating up the joints. They also lay out simple programming options: one day per week of hard 10-second intervals, two days with an added zone 3 or tempo-style session, and three days with more steady zone 2 work layered in. Whether you are a powerlifter, weightlifter, former athlete, jiu-jitsu player, or just a strong person who does not want to gas out walking up a hill, this episode gives you a simple framework for adding cardio without losing what you built in the gym.
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| 0:00.0 | Shrug family. Doug Larson here and this week on Barb Bell Strug, we're talking cardio for strength athletes, including everything you need to know about conditioning types, heart health, and building sports specific work capacity. We get into the many reasons why high intensity intervals are complementary to weightlifting, when to focus on zone two, and how to build your overall capacity while still going easy on your joints. Dr. Mike also breaks down the science of exactly how and why your heart gets stronger as |
| 0:24.3 | an adaptation to training, including the physiology behind improvements in stroke volume and left |
| 0:29.1 | ventricle hypertrophy. |
| 0:30.7 | So if you love to lift, but you also want to make some improvements to your cardio, this |
| 0:34.7 | episode is for you. |
| 0:35.7 | Enjoy the show. |
| 0:55.8 | Welcome to Barbell Strug. I'm Doug Larson here with Coach Travis Mash and Dr. Mike Lane. Today we're talking cardio for strength athletes. Actually, I didn't say this on the first round of this show that we got about 20 minutes into and then my lost Wi-Fi and power in my neighborhood. And so we're on round two here. But on the first round, I kind of kicked the mic first, |
| 1:11.7 | which I'm definitely going to do here in a second to talk kind of the science and the physiology behind, you know, the different types of cardio, kind of low-intensity cardio and high-intensity cardio, et cetera. We'll get in the more detail of that in here in just a moment. but I posted something on Instagram a week or two ago, |
| 1:17.1 | and kind of the big picture, like super basic concept that I was getting at was, |
| 1:22.6 | as a strength athlete, the less time you have to train, |
| 1:25.4 | the more you should focus on intensity and the more time you have to train, |
| 1:32.4 | the more you can focus on Zone 2 cardio and what have you. If you only have like 20 minutes per week to do cardio, then you pretty much have to do high intensity cardio or you're not going to get anything out of it. |
| 1:35.5 | But if you have five hours per week, then of course a ton of zone two cardio makes a lot of |
| 1:39.9 | sense. I still think that you should also layer in at least one high intensity session per week and touch max heart rate at least once per week. |
| 1:48.2 | And then I started talking about V-O-2 Max and a bunch of all this stuff too. |
| 1:50.5 | So that's kind of the genesis of this show. |
| 1:53.0 | We're going to get into all the details of the science as well as a lot of practical application. |
| 1:59.0 | MASH, before we dig into the science, again, a little bit of repeat from the first show |
| 2:04.2 | here, but you've focused on cardio a lot more in recent years. |
| 2:09.5 | You're super lean now. |
| 2:10.7 | You're shredded. |
| 2:11.6 | You're leaner than the many of the guys you train that are much younger and kind of |
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