One question that I am asked a lot and that I have seen countless times on internet message boards is whether a person should do cardiovascular exercise before or after resistance training. Before I continue, I want to clearly state that it is my position that everyone should engage in a cardio exercise of their choice for 5-10 minutes prior to any workout, be it cardio, resistance, or flexibility training. This is vitally important for a number of reasons, as proper light intensity cardio will warm up the muscles, ligaments, joints and tendons that will be used more intensively in the next exercise routine. Warming up with cardio also slightly raises your core temperature, increases circulation, slightly raises your heart rate, and helps prepare your heart for a greater workload, helps increase lung function, and helps you focus mentally on the next routine. of exercises. The most important benefit of warming up with light intensity cardio is the substantial reduction in your risk of injury. If the body is not warmed up properly, you are much more likely to experience a muscle, joint, ligament, or tendon injury.
Now let’s get back to the question of whether you should do cardio before or after resistance training. There is no single best answer here, and you should evaluate your individual fitness goals instead. If your goal is to build endurance, endurance, or overall cardiovascular health, I suggest doing your cardio training before weight and resistance training. By doing your cardio training first (after your 5-10 minute warm-up, of course), you can engage in a more intense cardio session, which could possibly include some intervals where you actually raise your lactic acid or VO2 threshold. Maximum level. You are much less likely to be able to achieve high intensity cardiovascular work after participating in a weight training session. So, in summary, if your goal is to increase cardiovascular fitness levels, you should do cardiovascular workouts 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 to do a cardio workout after resistance training, it increases the rate of fat metabolism (burning of fats like it is often called as). The theory is that by participating 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 body fat 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 completely deplete muscle glycogen. Therefore, I remain somewhat skeptical that many average exercisers exert themselves to the point of depleting glycogen during their resistance training, particularly workouts less than an hour in length. For more advanced trainers, I believe that it is possible and therefore may be an effective means of reducing body fat perhaps for these people.
I tend to see it this way, if you’re participating in cardio and resistance training on the same day in a row, one or the other will be of a lower intensity level naturally. 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 want to have as much muscle strength as you can available for your resistance workouts, therefore doing cardio before weight training would be counterproductive to your muscle building goals. If you are looking to gain endurance or heart health, focus on cardiovascular workouts and do them first. Remember, regardless of what you end up doing first, it’s more important to warm up properly 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 the Head in the right space for productive training and, most importantly, to reduce the risk of injury. This debate will mean nothing if you get injured within 5 minutes of a workout and are out of the game for the next 8 weeks rehabbing an injury!