If you’re planning to do cardio and weight training at the same time, you’re mixing them into one big block, unless you have time to go to the gym more than once a day. So, should you do exercise or lift weights first?
It’s almost strange that guys are now asking this question. For a long time, gym rats believed that exercise could slow your gains and that building muscle would make your cardio less effective.
Not long ago, scientists found that cardiovascular exercise can help you gain muscle, and muscle gain can help your cardiovascular function. A study in the Journal of Gerontology found that doing aerobic exercise for a long time is linked to stronger muscles later in life. The best endurance runners, swimmers, and bikers now hit the weight room a few times a week. According to experts at the University of Oklahoma, lifting weights can even help these athletes improve their VO2 max. Powerlifters and bodybuilders who are the strongest will also be on the cardio floor, even if it’s just to walk on the machine.
Also, cardio and weight training are both good for your health in different ways, and you need both for general health. A study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in 2022 found that people who did both cardio and weight training had a lower chance of death than people who only did cardio. The focus is no longer on what kind of training you should do, but on how to combine the two in a way that works best for you and your goals.
Based on your goals, these pros explain whether you should start your workout with cardio or weights.
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Tips for Determining If Cardio Should Come First or After Weights
There are a lot of things that affect the full answer to this question, such as your fitness level, exercise history, sports goals, and how much time you have each day to work out. There are also some false dilemmas because you can do fitness and strength training at the same time, like with high-intensity interval training (HIIT) and circuit training. But if your fitness goals are more general, you should do cardio and power training separately during the same workout. If you’re looking for a general rule, this is it: First do exercise, then lift weights. For the best results, follow these tips if you want to split your training into two workouts a day.
Why you should lift weights before you
You are more likely to get hurt during strength training because you are usually filling your muscles from the outside (with a barbell, dumbbells, kettlebells, resistance bands, etc.). Doing exercise to make your muscles tired before lifting weights will only raise that risk and ruin your weightlifting performance. You won’t be able to lift as much or do as many reps as you could when you first started strength training.
If you want to lift big things, your muscles need to be fresh so that you can do it correctly and load them enough to make the most of their growth stimulus. If you “pre-fatigue” your muscles with exercise, you can’t do that.
What Should I Do to Make My Heart Last Longer?
Of course, there’s also the other side of the argument: won’t lifting weights before exercise hurt your performance? Yes, that’s correct. According to research, your strength, speed, and endurance will probably go down. This is another reason to do running and strength training on different days.
However, lifting weights before aerobic exercise will not greatly raise your risk of injury. This is an important difference to keep in mind as you formulate your workouts and training plans.
Cardio and weight training should be done on different days to get the most out of both. But if you have to do exercise and weights at the same time, do the weights first.
Some people don’t follow the “weights before cardio” rule.
Some rules are meant to be broken, and the “lift first, do cardio second” rule is one of them. Here are a few times when you should change the story.
Getting ready
If you work out without warming up, it’s like running your car in the winter without letting it idle first. You’ll damage the engine or at least make it work less well.
It’s good for your muscles to do some light cardio to warm up before any workout, whether it’s strength training or exercise. You’ll get more blood flowing to all parts of your body, wake up your nervous system, and sharpen your mind, all of which will get you ready for a great sweat session.
Strength Training and HIIT
There are also times when it makes sense to do both exercise and strength training at the same time. A few of them are HIIT and circuit exercise. Two more are protocols that get you moving, such as EMOM and AMRAP. This is the main idea: By putting work first and taking short breaks as little as possible, you can keep your heart rate and metabolism high while also pushing your muscles to grow.
Simply put, you get the best of both worlds: cardiovascular conditioning burns calories and improves stamina, while strength training builds muscles and increases power.
But there’s a catch: you shouldn’t do these crazy workouts every day. You should only do it two or three times a week at most, because if you do it more often, your body won’t have enough time to heal between sessions. What are you going to do the other days? You got it: strength training and/or cardio with a lower heart rate.
