Should You Do Cardio Exercise Before or After Strength Training?
A question that I am often asked and one that I have seen innumerable times on message boards across the world wide web is whether a person must do cardiovascular exercise before or after a resistance training exercise? Before moving any further, I want to clearly state that it is my place that everyone should engage in a cardiovascular exercise of their choice for 5 to 10 minutes prior to any exercise, be it a cardiovascular, resistance or flexibility workout. This is vitally important for several reasons as a suitable, light-intensity cardiovascular exercise will warm up the muscles, ligaments, joints, and tendons that will be used more intensely from the subsequent exercise routine. Warming up with cardio also increases the heart temperature slightly, increases circulation, slightly elevates the heart rate and helps to prepare the heart for an increased workload, it helps to increase lung function and helps you to mentally focus in on the approaching workout routine. The most important advantage of warming up with light intensity cardio is the substantial decrease in risk of harm. In the event the body is not properly warmed up, you are considerably more likely to undergo an injury to a muscle, joint, ligament or tendon.
Now back to the question of whether you ought to do cardiovascular exercise prior to or after a resistance exercise? There is no single best answer here and instead, you should evaluate your individual fitness goals. If your goal is to increase endurance, stamina or overall cardiovascular health, then I suggest doing your cardio workout prior to weight and resistance training. By doing the cardio exercise (after your 5 to 10 minute warm-up of course), you are able to engage in a more extreme cardio session, which possibly may include some intervals in which you really push up to your lactic acid threshold or VO2 max degree. It is not as likely that you would be able to achieve high-intensity cardiovascular work after you have engaged in a weight training session. So, in summary, if your goal is to increase cardiovascular fitness levels, you should perform cardio workouts prior to resistance training.
On the other hand, if your goal is fat and weight reduction, a current mode of thinking from the fitness community is by simply performing a cardiovascular exercise after a resistance exercise, you increase the rate of fat metabolism (fat burn as it is often known as). The theory is that by engaging in an extreme resistance exercise, you may deplete the glycogen stores in the muscles in this exercise. When the glycogen stores are depleted, the body starts to utilize fats in the body for fuel. Endurance athletes have long known this, however typically in order for this to happen in endurance training, an athlete has to continuously run for approximately 90 minutes to fully deplete the muscles of glycogen. Therefore, I remain somewhat skeptical that many average folks exercising are forcing themselves to the point of glycogen depletion in their resistance work out, particularly workouts of less than an hour in duration.
I have a tendency to look at it like this, if you are engaging in a cardiovascular and resistance exercise on the same day back-to-back, one or the other will be of a lesser intensity level naturally. Again, evaluate your personal fitness goals prior to deciding whether to perform your cardio workouts prior to or after resistance training. If you are attempting 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 could be counterproductive for your muscle building goals. If you are wanting to gain endurance or heart health, place your focus on the cardio workouts and do them. Bear in mind, regardless of which you wind up doing , it is more important to properly warm up using a minimum of 5 to 10 minutes of cardio (even if it is simply a brisk walk on the treadmill) so as to prepare the body for the workouts ahead, to get your head in the ideal space so as to bang out a successful exercise, and most importantly to decrease the risk of harm. This debate won't mean a thing if you become injured 5 minutes into a workout and are sidelined for the next 8 weeks rehabilitating an accident!
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