A question I am often asked and seen countless times on Internet forums is whether a person should do cardio before or after resistance training. Before I go any further, I want to make it clear that my position is that everyone should do a cardio exercise of their choice for 5-10 minutes before any workout, whether it be cardio, resistance, or flexibility training. This is vitally important for a number of reasons, as proper, low-intensity cardiovascular exercise will warm up the muscles, ligaments, joints, and tendons that will be used more intensely in the next workout. The cardio warm up also slightly increases your core temperature, increases circulation, slightly elevates your heart rate and helps prepare your heart for an increased workload, helps increase lung function and helps you mentally focus on your next workout. exercises. The most important benefit of warming up with light intensity cardio is the substantially decreased risk of injury. If your body doesn’t warm up properly, you’re much more likely to experience a muscle, joint, ligament, or tendon injury.
Now back to the question of whether you should do cardio before or after resistance training. There is no single best answer here, and instead you should evaluate your individual fitness goals. If your goal is to increase stamina, endurance, or overall cardiovascular health, I suggest doing your cardio before weight and resistance training. By doing cardio first (after your 5-10 minute warmup, of course), you can engage in a more intense cardio session, which could possibly include some intervals where you really push up to your lactic acid threshold, or VO2 Max. level. You’re much less likely to be able to achieve high-intensity cardio work after you’ve participated in a weight-training session. So, in summary, if your goal is to increase cardiovascular fitness levels, you should do cardio before resistance training.
On the other hand, if your goal is fat and weight loss, a current way of thinking in the fitness community is that doing cardio after resistance exercise increases the rate of fat metabolism (burns fat). of fat, as it is often called as). The theory is that by engaging in intense resistance training, you will deplete the glycogen stores in your muscles during this workout. Once glycogen stores are depleted, the body begins to use the fats in the body for fuel. Endurance athletes have known this for a long time, but typically for this to occur in resistance training, an athlete has to run continuously for approximately 90 minutes to fully deplete muscle glycogen. Therefore, I remain somewhat skeptical that many average trainees push themselves to the point of glycogen depletion during their resistance training, particularly workouts under an hour in duration. For more advanced trainers, I think it is possible and therefore can be an effective means of reducing body fat, perhaps for these people.
I tend to look at it this way, if you’re doing cardio and resistance training on the same day, one or the other will naturally be at a lower intensity level. Once again, evaluate your personal fitness goals before deciding whether to do your cardio before or after resistance training. If you’re trying to build muscle, you want to have as much muscle strength as you can available for your resistance workouts, so doing cardio before weight training would be counterproductive to your muscle-building goals. If you’re looking to gain stamina or heart health, focus on cardio and do it first. Remember, regardless of what you end up doing first, it’s most important to properly warm up with a minimum of 5-10 minutes of cardio (even if it’s just a brisk walk on the treadmill) to prepare the body for the workouts ahead, to put your your head in the correct space for productive training and, most importantly, to reduce the risk of injury. This discussion won’t mean anything if you get injured 5 minutes after a workout and are sidelined for the next 8 weeks to rehab from injury!
