In mutualistic symbiotic radio (MSR) networks with hybrid active-passive communications (HAPC), the secondary user (SU) employs primary transmitter’s (PT’s) signals for conveying its information to the receiver (R) via backscatter communication (BC) and active communication (AC) alternatively. While it achieves a higher SU’s rate than that of the MSR, the co-channel interference between PT and SU exists during AC, leaving a room for further improving SU’s rate. In the light of this, we propose a new transmission strategy involving two phases within an entire transmission block. In the first phase, the PT, SU and R form the MSR to ensure that the achievable PT transmission performance is no worse than the case with only PT transmitting information in an entire transmission block, while in the second phase, the PT keeps silent and the SU performs AC, to avoid co-channel interference between PT and SU. To explore the advantage of the proposed strategy, we formulate two non-convex problems to maximize the SU’s rate by jointly optimizing transmit power of PT and SU, the transmission time in both BC and AC phases, and the SU’s reflection coefficient, subject to the same constraints on the energy consumption of PT and the energy causal constraint of SU, while one problem constraining the PT’s rate constraint and another one considering PT’s outage performance constraint. By using proof by contradiction and introducing auxiliary variables, two original problems are transformed into convex and solved by CVX. Simulation results confirm that our proposed strategy achieves a higher SU’s rate than the benchmarks that only perform BC, AC or hybrid of them.