I noticed on your updated templates in the schedule section you recommend doing the cardio immediately after lifting.
Was curious the reasoning for this vs doing it on an off day?
I am someone who does not mind going to the gym more days a week if it is simply a reason like better likely good of adherence.
Or is it for reasons like better outcomes by having very clear “hard” days and “easy” days?
It’s mostly a recommendation for logistics, i.e. you’re already at the gym, so go ahead and knock it out. All else being equal, it doesn’t seem to matter if the conditioning is done right after a workout or on its own day. I just found that people weren’t really doing it otherwise 
Jordan, I chose the hypertrophy II because you recommended it since I was having a dang hard time following my own cardio plans going twice a week just for that because, I just didn’t want to do it so I didn’t. When all else fails, modify… 
. I modified conditioning right the heck off my plan.
For 3 glorious weeks I have hit the 150 mins of recommended cardio for good health because I followed your scheduling and stacked it. But, alas, I go back to work this week and once again, my Life is a sham. I ran for an hour just to get it in and now I have to piece the rest of the minutes together until I’m back in some sort of flow with the work situation. I can’t make myself get to the gym before 5 am.
If I can only tack on 10 mins running after lifting a couple days and then do 2 longer sessions on other days, is this ok? I’m trying to hit the dang 150 mins and it’s going to be hard once I’m back at work unless I build it into PE at school (I’m a teacher) and then it will be like a few 20 Min sessions and some longer ones on my own. Is this ok? I know some podcast I listened to, not yours, said the first 10 mins doesn’t really count because you’re just warming up.
Ty!
Hi Jessica!
Welcome to the forum 
Your setup is completely fine, and it’s what I’d tell you to do anyway. The 150 minutes doesn’t have to come in tidy twice-a-week blocks or really any specific frequency. Split it however your week allows: 10 minutes after lifting a couple of days, a few 20-minute sessions, a longer run or two on your own. What matters for the health benefit is the weekly total, however you assemble it. And since the training effect doesn’t turn into a pumpkin and vanish at midnight, you can look at it (training load) over the whole month, which takes the pressure off any single messy week.
On the warm-up thing, the claim is usually that the first 10 minutes don’t count because your heart rate hasn’t come up yet. But the heart rate lagging isn’t the same as the work not counting. What drives the adaptation is the metabolic demand, and that’s already elevated the moment you’re running (or whatever) at a real pace, while your heart rate is still catching up. Heart rate is a downstream signal that lags what your body is doing. It’s exactly why exercise snacks work: short bouts, sometimes a minute or less, still drive adaptations, which couldn’t happen if only the sustained, heart-rate-elevated minutes counted. You see the same disconnect from the other direction with cardiac drift, where your heart rate keeps climbing through a steady effort even though the workload hasn’t changed. So a 10-minute run at a real pace after lifting counts, all ten, heart rate lag and all.
Being flexible is likely to help with hitting to prescribed conditioning target
Further reading
If time ever becomes a bigger issue, there’s also a Time Crunch Template built around this exact problem, but you’re doing great on Hypertrophy II, so no need to switch anything right now.