Why do lifting before cardio

But mixing up your weight training and cardio sessions throughout the week gives your body the space and energy to adapt to one specific way of moving at a time. It pretty much completely prevents any negative interaction between the two — giving your muscles time to mend after lifting or cardio and your body time to fully recover. No matter which way you lay things out — doing cardio before or after workout time — the bottom line is that you do need to get a regular plan going.

Maximise your exercise by working with one of our personal trainers — experts in progressive and playful functional fitness. Continuous activities such as running, cycling, climbing, rowing or swimming at a moderate to high level, maintained for at least half-an-hour, three to seven days a week, deliver all kinds of benefits: It improves cardiovascular health, lessening the risk of heart disease.

You get a buzzy mood-booster, thanks to feel-good chemicals endorphins triggered by heart-rate-increasing cardio. This positive feeling can last up to 24 hours, like a natural antidepressant. One of the issues with cardio before weight lifting has to do with the fatigue that a cardio workout can induce. Excessive running can leave you tired, which then impacts the amount of force you can produce.

In case of any injury where the muscles or the nervous system is even slightly impaired, then you'll face difficulty in performing optimally. Weight training before cardio prevents your arteries from becoming stiff and helps you increase muscular strength. Cardio before weights is a good idea if your goal is to be in shape with enough muscle to turn heads. By choosing to do the cardio workout first, you will elevate your heart rate as well as your internal temperature and metabolism.

This will help you burn more calories than you would have if you were only lifting weights or lift weights first. On the contrary, going to the weights directly allows you to have all the energy you need to lift as hard as you want.

That makes it simpler to build huge muscles. Also, the anaerobic energy system that the body uses to power your weight lifting workouts isn't as efficient as the aerobic system, leading to fast depletion of your glycogen stores. If your aim is to build strength, doing cardio after weight training is ideal as lifting is hard, and you would require all the energy both physically and mentally that you can get to avoid injury and properly lift weights.

Weight training should also come first if your primary goal is weight loss. A study also suggests that doing cardio after weight training helps to burn more fat during the initial period of that cardio workout versus doing cardio before weights. Every individual has different ideas for what they want to achieve in terms of the benefits of joining the gym.

By the time you're ready to start the weightlifting portion of your gym routine, your body is prime for fat loss. Since there is no desire to gain large muscles with your weightlifting sessions, the fact you won't be able to go as hard as you would have been able to if you didn't start your workout session with a cardio routine won't make any difference.

If your top priority when you walk inside a gym is to lose weight and burn fat, you're better off starting off with the weightlifting portion of your workout, then moving over to a low-intensity cardiovascular exercise. The reasoning for this is simple. As stated earlier, the anaerobic energy system isn't close to being as efficient as the aerobic energy system that is typically used during cardio sessions, so the glycogen stored in your body is depleted at a significantly higher rate when you're lifting weights, compared to when you're jogging or swimming for instance.

So, when you start off a workout by lifting weights, your glycogen reserves are burnt off a lot faster, forcing your body to start converting fat to energy, then eventually muscle. This is obviously beneficial to someone whose main focus is to lose weight since your body will likely start burning fat off before you even begin cardio work.

Compare that to a person doing only cardio, whose body might spend up to an hour depleting glycogen reserves before beginning the fat burning process. Adenosine triphosphate ATP is the fuel that the human body runs off.

That's what allows you to contract your muscles when you're doing bicep curls. The thing is, there's only a limited amount of this ATP in your muscles at all times. When it's all gone, your body needs to make more quickly. There are three main energy systems that power the human body. For our discussion, we only need to cover two of these systems. From simply glancing at the conversion ratios above, it's obvious the aerobic system is a lot more efficient than the anaerobic system.

Depending on the particular activity you're performing, it can take your body up to an hour to deplete your glycogen stores. Once the glycogen is out of the way, your body begins to burn fat, then eventually muscle when there is no more fat to burn. That's the reason why there's no clear-cut answer to the question: "Should I do cardio or weight lifting first when I go to the gym? The American College of Sports Medicine recommends minutes of moderate to intense physical activity a week, and a mixture of strength and cardiovascular training but there's not much information out there on which should be done first.

At the end of the day, the most important thing when it comes to figuring out whether you should be doing your cardio or weightlifting first is making sure you're getting the right amount of both in the first place. Lots of weightlifting without enough cardio, and you will likely find your impressive muscles being covered up by layers of fat. Likewise, lots of cardio without enough weightlifting will leave you looking more like a marathon runner instead of a lean, mean muscle machine.

When starting a new workout routine, before you even get to the part where you're trying to figure out whether cardio or weight lifting should be done first, you need to understand your body. Endomorphs are people who are often pear-shaped, with large amounts of body fat. If you have this body type, you'll likely have a harder time burning off fat and keeping it off, so you need to factor that in when coming up with a workout plan.

Ectomorphs tend to be on the long and lean side. These are people with very fast metabolic systems, whose bodies burn off fat easily and have little problem keeping it off. Ectomorphs tend to have a hard time adding muscle mass to their frame. Mesomorphs are the people who find themselves in-between the two groups above. Mesomorphs tend to be well-built and muscular with high metabolism and muscles that respond very well to any stimulation. These people tend to have the easiest time achieving the "perfect body.

To maximize your gains, it is important you figure out where you stand in all this. For example if you are an ectomorph trying to build muscle, you certainly want to hit the weights first.