I have noticed this for some time: When I get done with my cardio, I walk through the weight room on my way out of the building and see some of the same folks who just spent a half hour on a bike or treadmill now pumping iron.
I don’t get it.
When I’m done with my cardio, I’m soaking wet and I’m going home.
Occasionally, I have done weightlifting second and found that I left all of the equipment sweaty (I wiped it off) and I was already tired before I began.
i usually do cardio first. if i lift weights first then i am too tired to do cardio but i can do cardio first and lift afterwards. And i don’t workout light when im doing cardio either, i put the machines on level 7 intensity (most people choose 2 or 3 tops) so i am burning upwards of 900 calories/hr according to the machine at that intensity.
sometimes however i split cardio & lift in between. example, 30 minutes cardio, lift for 15 minutes, 15 more minutes cardio, go home.
Besides cardio is a good way to warm up your muscles.
That’s why I do cardio first. I know a lot of people will argue and say to do weights first, but I can do cardio at my own pace - warm up slow, work it hard, then cool down, and I’m still in the mood and ready to do weights after 40 minutes of cardio. I have also heard the argument that you shouldn’t do cardio and weights on the same day, but I can only make it to the gym every other day, so that’s the way I do it. Yeah, I’m sweaty after cardio, but it’s a freakin’ gym. If I wasn’t all sweaty, I’d be wasting my time.
I do a cardio warmup on the bike or treadmill or something, about 10 minutes, but I do my real cardio after the weights. When I’m done with my cardio, I’m done - any weight work at that point would be so ineffective as to be silly. The machines don’t go down that far. Plus, I do my cardio on an elliptical trainer, with no upper body involvement - so if I did my weights after that, I’d end up doing a lot less leg work than I do now. I don’t understand how it can possibly work to do your cardio first. Plus, I’d be all sweaty.
After a weight session, I’ll do about 12-15 minutes of aerobic work–pretty light if I did legs, sprint intervals if I did upper body–to burn through some of the free fatty acids floating around in my bloodstream. I always use the cross-trainer to get a little extra kick.
I do cardio before I start the weight session.According to my instructor the body needs to be properly warmed up to get maximum benifit from the weights.
But he could be wrong too.I have seen really well toned guys hitting the weights directly even before getting warmed up.
So I dont know what is more appropriate.Although personally I preffer doing the warm ups first and then hit the weights.
Yep, I do cardio first. Though there are still loads of people who hit the weights before finishing off on the bikes, treadmills or whatever. Whatever one’s comfortable with, I suppose.
I warm up for a few minutes on a cardio machine, but I don’t do any “real (meaning a good hard 45 mins to an hour at a good fat burning heartrate target range)” cardio on weight training days. I do “real” cardio in between WT days.
When you do weight training, you’re “tearing down” muscle tissue, which (to simplify) forces your body to “call in more troops” or to add muscle.
To add cardio on top of that is to interfere with this process. To many of those who weight train, this is a pretty common practice. For a lot of body builders, they don’t do cardio at all, except for very light warm ups.
When I do weight training, I do “cooldown” for about 5-7 minutes on the treadmill on Lower body days, but other than that? Nope.
35–40 minutes moderate cardio, either on the treadmill or stair-climber, sometimes a combo of the two
20–25 minutes on the circuit weights
10 more minutes light cardio (usually a bike) to cool down.
I don’t see what the big deal about being sweaty is–I like sweaty, it means I’m doing something right–and I don’t go hard enough on the cardio to be too exhausted to lift. I think if I did the weights first I’d tend to skimp on my cardio time and I don’t want to give myself any excuses to do that…
When I used to work out, I did them simultaneously - I’d hop on a weight machine, do 10 upper body reps, hop on another machine and do 10 lower body reps, and then hop on the stairmaster or whatever for 5 minutes, and repeat. I’m not sure how productive it is, but I can certainly say it kept my heart rate going, and I saw a lot of strength benefit from it.
I do 20 min on the treadmill… longer if I have hit a particularily interesting place in my book.
Then downstairs to do the machines. I have free weights at home so I use the gym primarily for legs, thighs and tummy.
After that I can usually ooze back up the stairs and out to my truck to go home.
Having done both with some regularity, I prefer doing cardio afterwards. I don’t have any real good physiological reasons, but here are my top two:
Cardio tends to tire me out, so I can’t lift as hard as I could if I did it after the lifting.
I’m ** really ** sweaty after the cardio, and I don’t like slip-sliding around on equipment while I’m working out, or having to swab it down like crazy afterward.
I’m not too concerned about the size-building negatives of cardio and weight lifting; I’m big enough already, and when I have to drive 30 minutes to the gym each way, I’m going to do as much as I can while I’m there.
Another one for cardio before weights. For people complaining about being sweaty after cardio – don’t you do cool-down stretches? After running, it takes me about 15 minutes to properly stretch everything, by which time I’m reasonably dry, or at least not soaking wet.
Weights first, then cardio.
I had a trainer explain it to me why it was better once, something about lactic acid, made sense at the time.
The real reason I do it that way is because I want to put as much energy into weights as possible, cardio, well, that’s relative. Just need your heart rate up, and if you’re fatigued, you can lower your intensity and still get your heart rate up. Whereas for weights, if you’re fatigued, you can’t get the proper reps in.
I’m glad to see that I’m not totally in the minority.
For all of you folks who say “you’re supposed to get sweaty in a gym,” there’s a subtle difference between a fine sheen of sweat accentuating your biceps and having a t-shirt that is so wet that it weighs five pounds.
I’m in the second group, hence my aversion to post-cardio weights. When I get home from the gym, I hang up the t-shirt on a hook until the next day – if I put it in the hamper, everything else would get mildewy.
I always do some sort of cardio warm up first. If I’m really unmotivated, I’ll do at least 10-15 minutes, then lift. On days I’m somewhat motivated, I’ll do about 30 minutes of running, then lift for about 45-60 minutes. However, if I’m training for something, I will occaisionally do 30 minutes of running, 30-40 minutes of lifting, then 30 more minutes of cardio. But I only do that once a week to see how my legs handle running when they’ve been stressed. It’s good practice, but not necessarily always smart.
My usual routine, though, is to do 30 minutes cardio, then 45-60 minutes of weights.
I also stretch every morning and every time I work out.
On weight-days, I do about 5-10 min. cardio, then lifting, then if I feel like it, about 20 min. cardio, then stretching. I do the weights first because on my weight-days, the cardio is secondary and I might not feel like doing it.
