Should You Do Cardio Exercise Before or After Strength Training?

One question I am often asked and one that I have seen countless times on message boards on the internet is whether one should do cardiovascular exercise before or after a resistance training workout? Before going any further, I want to clearly state that it is my position that everyone should engage in the cardiovascular exercise of their choice 5 to 10 minutes before any workout, whether it is cardiovascular, resistance, or flexibility workouts. Ho. This is important for many reasons as proper, light-intensity heart exercise will warm muscles, ligaments, joints, and tendons that will be used more intensely in the following workout routines. Warming up with cardio also increases core temperature slightly, increases circulation, slightly increases heart rate, and helps prepare the heart an increased workload, it helps to increase lung functioning. Is and helps you to mentally focus on the upcoming workout routine. The most important benefit of warming up to light intensity cardio is a substantial reduction in injury risk. If the body is not heated properly, you are more likely to experience injury to muscles, joints, ligaments, or tendons.

Now back to the question of whether you should do cardiovascular exercise before or after a resistance workout? There is no single best answer here and instead, you should evaluate your personal fitness goals. If you aim to increase endurance, stamina, or overall heart health, I suggest doing your cardio workouts before weight and resistance training. By doing cardio workouts first (after your 5 to 10-minute warmup), you are able to engage in more intense cardio sessions, which may possibly include some intervals in which you actually push up to your lactic acid threshold or VO2 The highest level. It is much less likely that you will be able to achieve high-intensity cardiovascular work after being engaged in a weight training session. So, in short, if your goal is to increase your heart health level, then you should do cardio workouts before resistance training.

On the other hand, if your goal is to lose fat and weight, then a current way of thinking in the fitness community is to do a heart workout after a resistance workout, you increase the rate of fat metabolism (often referred to as fat burning. Is like). The theory is that by engaging in an intense resistance workout, you will exhaust the glycogen stores in the muscles during this workout. Once glycogen reserves are depleted, the body begins to use body fat for fuel. Endurance athletes have known this for a long time, yet in order to be generally in endurance training, an athlete has to walk continuously for about 90 minutes to completely depress the glycogen muscles. Therefore, I have some doubts that many average people working outdoors are pushing themselves to the point of glycogen deficiency during their resistance workouts, especially workouts of less than an hour. For more advanced trainers, I believe it is possible and therefore may perhaps be an effective means of reducing body fat for these individuals.

I would like to see it this way, if you are engrossed in a cardiovascular and resistance workout on the same day, one or the other will naturally have a lower intensity level. Again, evaluate your personal fitness goals before deciding whether to do your cardio workouts before or after resistance training. If you are trying to build muscle, you can make your muscles available for your resistance workouts, so doing cardio before weight training would be counterproductive to your muscle-building goals. If you want to achieve endurance or heart health, then concentrate on cardio workouts and do them first. Remember, regardless of what you are doing before, it is more important to properly warm the body for a minimum of 5 to 10 minutes of cardio (even if it is only brisk walking on the treadmill) to prepare the body. Workout further, to get your head in the right place to get out of a productive workout, and most importantly to reduce the risk of injury. This debate will not mean that if you are injured 5 minutes into a workout and are sidelined for one injury rehabilitation for the next 8 weeks!