Should You Do Cardiovascular Before Or After Weight Training?

A question that is often asked when it comes to effective muscle building and fat loss, is when should you do cardio work? Is it most effective before or after strength training? As is very often true in the topic of muscle growth and fitness, it completely is based on on the individual and what their goals are.



But what will be best for you? Below, you can find some frequent ambitions, and how to go about achieving them in terms of strength training and cardio training.



1. If you goal is essentially to build muscle fast, then doing your cardio exercise before you start hitting the weights it may drain you of the energy necessary to get the real gains you want. When you want to bulk up and add muscle mass, it is necessary that your body has enough stored energy to drive the muscles to the limit. you must be able to workout, until the muscles can't do any more, not until you have no energy left. If this describes your goal, then I would recommend doing a rigorous muscle building workout first, and then a short but intense cardio session. This needs to be roughly 10-15 minutes at the end of your workout, but should be done with lots of intensity.



2. Want to improve your fitness, such as training to perform a marathon or some other endurance sports then I would advise doing your training in a couple of sessions. In the morning do an easy muscle building training session, followed by your cardio work in the afternoon, or vice versa. But don't ignore the muscle growth training because you don't believe it will help out your endurance. Strength training is necessary for increasing the strength of the joints and will help you to avoid injury.



3. Is weight loss you goal, and you are looking to drop several pounds? Well in this case the best way to go is to combine weight training and cardio training into what's known as circuit training. You can do this by combining various strength training exercises, with not much rest in between. What this does for you is keep your heart rate fast, but also makes sure it is performing at several different rates, because of the different intensities of the exercises. The greatest way to lose weight and fat is to have your heart working at a selection of different rates.



4. If you really just want to keep and maintain what you have, i.e. don't add any fat or weight and not really add any more muscle, then it is fine to do cardio training before your strength training. Just be sure that you do both regularly.



So to reply to the issue of when to perform cardiovascular training, you first need to decide what your ambition is, and go from there. The above will help you decide.