Importance of Cardio Exercise Before or After Strength Training?

Should You Do Cardio Exercise Before or After Strength Training?

A question that I am often solicited and one that I have seen countless times on message boards across the Internet is whether any person should do cardiovascular exercise before or after a resistance training workout? Before going any, also, I wish to clearly state that it is my position that everyone should engage in a cardiovascular exercise of their decision for 5 to ten minutes sooner than any physical exercise, be it a cardiovascular, resistance, or flexibility physical exercise. This is vitally essential for different reasons as an adequate, light-intensity cardiovascular exercise will warm up the muscles, ligaments, joints, and tendons that will be used more intensely in the next workout habit. Warming up with cardio additionally increases the core temperature slightly, increases circulation, slightly elevates the heart rate, and assists to prepare the heart for an increased workload, it benefits increase lung functioning and helps you to mentally focus on the upcoming workout habit. The most essential advantage to warming up with light intensity cardio is the substantial reduction in risk of injury. If the body is not in a proper way warmed up, you are much more probable to experience an injury to a muscle, joint, ligament, or tendon.

Now back to the question of whether you should do cardiovascular exercise sooner than or after a resistance workout? There is no single absolute answer here and as a replacement, you should evaluate your individual fitness goals. If your ambition is to expand endurance, stamina, or overall cardiovascular health, then I recommend doing your cardio workout sooner than weight and resistance training. By doing the cardio physical exercise first (after your 5 to ten minute warm-up of course), you can engage in a more intense cardio session, which probably might include a few intervals in which you truly push up to your lactic acid threshold or VO2 max level. It is much less probable that you would be able to accomplish high-intensity cardiovascular work after you have engaged in a weight training session. So, in short, if what you want is to increase cardiovascular fitness levels, you should execute cardio workouts sooner than resistance training.

On the other hand, if your ambition is fat and weight loss, a current way of thinking in the fitness community is by doing a cardiovascular physical exercise after a resistance physical exercise, you increase the rate of fat metabolism (fat burn as it is often referred to as). The assumption is that by engaging in an intense resistance physical exercise, you will deplete the glycogen stores in the muscles throughout this physical exercise. Once the glycogen stores are depleted, the body begins to utilize fats in the body for fuel. Endurance athletes have long known this, yet generally, for this to arise in endurance training, an athlete has to continuously run for more or less 90 minutes to fully deplete the muscles of glycogen. Therefore, I stay somewhat skeptical that multiple average people working out are pushing themselves to the point of glycogen depletion throughout their resistance physical exercise, especially workouts of less than an hour in duration. For more advanced trainers, I do believe that it is doable and therefore can be a proven means of decreasing body fat may be for these individuals.

I tend to look at it like this if you are engaging in a cardiovascular and resistance physical exercise on the same day back-to-back, one or the other will be of a lesser intensity level easily. Again, evaluate your personal fitness goals before selecting whether to do your cardio workouts before or after resistance training. If you are trying to construct muscle, you plan to have as much muscle strength as you can access for your resistance workouts, therefore doing cardio before weight training would be counterproductive to your muscle-building goals. if what you want is to gain endurance or heart health, place your concentrate on the cardio workouts and do them first. think of, although of which you end up doing first, it is more essential to in a proper way warm up with a minimum of 5 to ten minutes of cardio (even if it is only a brisk walk on the treadmill) so that prepare the body for the workouts ahead, to get your head in the correct space so that bang out a productive physical exercise, and most importantly to reduce the risk of injury. This discussion won’t mean a thing if you get injured 5 minutes into a physical exercise and are sidelined for the following 8 weeks rehabilitating an injury!