While this article might sound initially like a YouTube commercial with a shirtless bro talking about your belly fat, hear us out. We wrote this piece because we’ve met tons of locals who trained and played hard but never achieved the physique they wanted.

At best, they got that “skinny fat” look, meaning they lost weight but retained a high percentage of body fat and low percentage of muscle mass. 

People who strictly do cardio workouts and endurance sports, like long-distance running and cycling, tend to become skinny fat unless they’re genetic freaks. Running and cycling do burn calories, but they won’t help you develop a lean, toned look.

Why? Your body adapts to whatever physical challenges you present to it. Look at the athletes who line up for an Olympic marathon. They’re almost skeletal-looking. They put countless hours of training time into running long distances, and their physique has adapted to it.

Then look at athletes who line up for 100-, 200-, or 400-meter sprints. They are lean but shredded. They have the beach body that people tend to want — even people who live at 7,000 feet. They don’t run long distances, but they do train strength, speed and power.

Weightlifting — specifically, strength and hypertrophy training — build up the muscle tone and mass that a sprinter has but a marathoner lacks. It also changes your resting metabolic rate to burn more calories when you’re sitting around reading The Park Record.

Here’s what drives us insane: Parkites believe they can get that sprinter physique by combining weightlifting and cardio in the same high intensity interval training (HIIT) workout. HIIT — or more accurately, HIIT classes that involve high-rep lifting and cardio with minimal rest — is popular all over town because it feels like an amazing workout that should make you appear lean and toned.

Misplaced belief in that feeling is the main reason so many locals don’t look the way they want to. Their goals don’t align with the type of training they have selected.

When you combine cardio and high-rep weightlifting in long HIIT workouts, you ask your body to get better at operating efficiently while flooded with lactic acid. This is a different adaptation than strength training, which asks the body for more and stronger muscles.

These cardio-weight mashups also set you up for overuse injuries. Both styles of training focus on volume, and they use your body rather than build it up. That’s why so many people end these workouts lying on the floor in a puddle of sweat, feeling drained. 

A well-structured strength program focuses on building your joints and muscles so that they can handle the volume of your endurance sport. Your body needs recovery time to gain strength and build lean tissue after workouts. That is why a real strength workout doesn’t leave you in a puddle of sweat. You train near max intensity but take longer rests between sets — at least 90 seconds.

To summarize, combining strength and cardio in the same HIIT workout defeats your efforts to look toned, raises your risk of injury, and wastes the time you spent weightlifting. Lose, lose, lose.

Now read carefully: training strength and cardio in separate workouts, on separate days, will help you cut fat and get toned. In fact, it’s more effective than weightlifting alone.

Try it for yourself. Do two to three cardio workouts per week and two to three strength workouts per week. Don’t mix them.

Divide your lifting blocks (about four to six weeks of workouts) into strength and hypertrophy. In strength blocks, go heavy. Keep your reps at 4-6 per set. For your hypertrophy blocks, do 8-15 reps, aiming for near failure (1-2 reps in reserve). You should get a good “pump” (which, to quote 1977 Arnold Schwarzenegger, is “the most satisfying feeling you can get in the gym”).

For cardio workouts, do your sport! Run, bike, XC ski, etc. You could do more specialized cardio training, but let’s not overcomplicate this. Go have fun. Try something more specialized if you hit a plateau in your training.

A few caveats to the no mixing lifting and cardio. You can follow strength training with a light walk, short bike ride, or jog (i.e., Zone 2 cardio). If you do want some conditioning at the end of a strength or hypertrophy workout, keep it to 10 minutes or less and use sprints.

Try four sets of sled pushes with a minute rest between each or a Tabata on an aerodyne bike (20 seconds pedaling all out, 10 second rest, eight rounds total). Yup, a Tabata is a type of HIIT workout, but not the kind that we’ve been warning about. You should feel challenged but refreshed rather than wrecked at the end.

Be skeptical of the cardio-weight HIIT enthusiasts who are genetic freaks and going to look ripped no matter what they do. They don’t know how frustrating it is to be skinny fat after training so damn hard. When you lift weights, just weight lifts. When you do cardio, just do cardio. You will get lean and toned.

Ben Van Treese, is a co-founder of 100 Year Athlete, and Alex Wetmore, PhD, the director of coaching at Minerstown Park City.