A lot of people wonder if they do cardio after or before lifting weights? It’s depends. Here’s when cardio comes first or after your workout and why.
A different people do their cardio before lifting weights, others do it after, and some of them do it right in the middle. No matter when, the most important is doing your cardio at least a few times a week.
Even if you want to get big, and you’re afraid of burning calories, you still should do some cardio exercises. There are plenty of reasons to do aerobic exercises apart from just burning fats. A strong and healthy heart and lungs will correspond to a healthy and stronger body, a better pump, and better body fitness overall.
What’s The Best Time To Do Cardio?
Most people don’t have the time for a long workout session. They want to boost their endurance, and develop their resting heart rate, but at the same time they want to build muscle mass.
So, they have to decide whether doing their cardio first or after or mixing it with other exercises in the middle of the session.
And the truth is, there is a supreme time to do cardio…kind of.
How About First Thing In The Morning?
Some people get up early in the morning to do a full cardio workout, then go to the gym for a weight lifting session later in the day. An early morning run and a weight lifting workout later is great for those who have time for 2 workout sessions a day.
Typically, those people don’t have any meal before their morning cardio session. If their goal is to burn fat that could be a good idea, as the body burns off calories before consuming any. However, your body will switch to self-preservation mode and initiate feeding off muscles in place of fat, which is eventually not a good idea.
If you’re going to integrate a long cardio workout into your program before breakfast, a good idea would be drinking a protein shake or take a light pre-workout. Your energy will be high, also your body will no longer burning all of its energy just to stay alive.
What About Before Weight Lifting?
A lot of people prefer to do their cardio session before lifting weights. If you only have one hour to go to the gym and train, this appears quite acceptable. But if your aim is to reach a high level of strength and endurance, sorry to tell you that you’ll be disappointed. The 20 minutes you invest in your cardio training isn’t going to be sufficient to see results in your aerobic standards, and is going to really drain your muscle strength right when you need it before your weight lifting exercises.
In lieu of performing an adequate cardio session and an adequate lifting session, you’ll have short-changed yourself with a rapid run and a rapid lift. You’ll mostly preserve a good health and strength this way, but you won’t be able to see big changes.
If your goal is good health, then this is a perfect way to get it. But if your fitness objectives include expedite greatness in either cardio, strength, or mass, then you’ll have to try something else.
What About After Weight Lifting?
This seems a good and suitable idea for people on a persistent gym schedule.
The highest strain on your muscles will come from big weight lifting so, it’s in your favor to do that first while you yet have muscle strength, but your glycogen stores required for cardio exercises, won’t have been exhausted by weight lifting.
You’ll be able to do 45 minutes of weight lifting, pursued by 20 minutes of cardio, with your stamina scales continuing approximately strong.
The Best Bet
They are two methods to get the gains of a complete cardio and weightlifting session.
First, you can make extra time in your schedule and start doing full cardio training sessions of one hour, along with your weightlifting program of however time will it take you.
Second, and the more functional way for most people is to superset your cardio and weightlifting workouts.
For example, a superset of 5 minutes of cardio and 5 minutes of weightlifting exercise of your choice, reciprocally for one hour.
Conclusion
If you got time to do two-in one a day or add some hours in your week to do divided workouts, one day for cardio and the next day for weightlifting, then you have no issues.
But, if you don’t have much time and you only have one hour, and you want to do weightlifting and cardio in one hour, your best option is to superset or do cardio after you done lifting weights.