To determine which comes first, cardio or weights, you need to consider your goal.
If you want to gain muscle mass, the first thing to do is weight training, to gain strength and muscle mass, which we know as anaerobic exercise.
On the contrary, cardio, or cardiovascular exercise is used when you want to oxidize fat, since it consumes glycogen from the muscles.
If you do weights after cardio, your muscles can’t reach their maximum effort so they’re fatigued and they wouldn’t have enough energy left to finish the exercises, then it would be less effective for your fat loss goal.
What is cardio and what are weights?
First let’s clarify what cardio or cardiovascular exercise is, it is about heart strengthening exercise. Any physical activity that increases your heart rate and gets your blood pumping can be considered cardio.
Aerobics, jumping rope, treadmill, jogging, these are examples of cardio exercises, the aim of which is to raise the heart rate, increase blood circulation, contract muscles and move the body rhythmically.
For its part, the exercise of weights is the exercise of muscular strengthening, the exercise of resistance.
It is about working against resistance to gain muscle and increase strength. When we refer to this type of exercise, it can be free weights or machines.
The goal is for the muscles to get stronger and thus increase in size, in a process known as hypertrophy.
Combining cardio and weights is possible, there are even benefits to doing so, but as we have mentioned, the order of the exercises if you go cardio or weights first and their intensity depends on your goals.
What goes first?
Before doing weights you should do a warm up which is usually done with light cardio.
Cardio goes first before weights as a warm-up exercise can work for you, jumping rope, jogging or walking on the treadmill, dynamic stretching such as moving your arms in a circle above your head, among others.
According to the goal, once the cardio session is over and you perform weights, your energy levels will be depleted, at which point if you continue to exercise with light weights and high repetitions, you will increase muscular endurance.
Conversely, if your goal is fat loss, you can do cardio before weight training, as lifting weights can help promote weight loss.
Another position is in both ways, both to gain muscle and to lose fat, since all the glycogen is used through the weights and we will be able to have greater strength than if we do it the other way around.
It means that if we do cardio before the weights, we will arrive at the machines more tired and with less energy, because we will have wasted a large part of our glycogen in cardio.
If we do our weight session earlier, our glycogen will have been emptied to a greater extent, and we will reach cardiovascular exercise in an optimal way to burn fat.
Advise yourself with JP Osorio FIT
Advise yourself with me! We will evaluate your condition together in order to draw up an achievable goal, we will determine some correct routines to achieve it and we will review if cardio or weights come first.
