Which Comes First, Cardio or Weight Training?

My primary goal is to lose body fat (baby weight) and keep my heart healthy. However, I am told I need to add weight training to my daily cardio or I lose muscle mass. Which exercise should I do first, cardio or weight training (when doing both in the same day)? Also, should I have an "Upper Body Day" and a "Leg Day" and a "Stomach Day"?

Always a lot of conflicting answers. If doing both on the same day, a lot of us suggest doing the weights first before doing the cardio. If I have a double booked for a day, I always try to do about 5 - 10 minutes of light cardio to warm up before hitting the weights. You want as much strength and energy as possible to do the lifts. If you did your cardio first, your energy might be depleted - hence the recommendation to do weights first.

Another way is to construct your week so your lifting days stand alone by themselves, as do the cardio days. That's pretty much how I try to build my weeks so I can give 100% to both.

My understanding is to weight training first to deplete as much glycogen as possible. Then go to long duration cardio and your body turns to fat stores for energy. I've had a lot of success with interval training for 20-25 minutes then a nice long bike ride at about 65% max heart rate.

My primary goal is to lose body fat (baby weight) and keep my heart healthy. However, I am told I need to add weight training to my daily cardio or I lose muscle mass. Which exercise should I do first, cardio or weight training (when doing both in the same day)? Also, should I have an "Upper Body Day" and a "Leg Day" and a "Stomach Day"?

Pretty much all of the above answers. I'm no expert ( which is code, for this advice could be useless :blushing: ) But, I do cardio at home, so I don't worry too much, if I get it done a few hours before going to the gym to do resistance training. I do a sort of mandatory 5min warmup on an elliptical or something, then, weights. As someone else said, I don't want to be all sweaty from the cardio when doing weights so that's another reason, to do your cardio after weights, as well as not depleting your strength.

You will find lots of benefits from doing both cardio and weight training. I wish I'd started weight training much sooner than I did.

As for separate body parts days.... it depends on how serious you are about your weight training. If you want to go to the gym almost every day, say 6 days a week, and weight train.... then ( I think ) the common school of thought is to do upper body one day, and legs the next. I was taught that abs / core could generally be done every day. ( I dunno if that applies if you were working your abs hard, though.... ) If you weight train more like every other day, then, you could just do a complete ( full body ) routine, each time.

Which exercise should I do first, cardio or weight training (when doing both in the same day)?

Various sources will give you various answers, but I think you should do whichever order enables you to put in the most effort without getting completely drained. Personally, I do weights first because I find that I'm able to lift a lot more and with better/safer form if I'm fresh and not already tired from cardio.

Also, should I have an "Upper Body Day" and a "Leg Day" and a "Stomach Day"?

When I first started lifting I did the New Rules of Lifting for Women program and then the Stronglifts 5x5 program, both of which are full-body programs that are designed to be done about 3x per week rather than every day. Now that I've been lifting for a while, I do isolated muscle groups which enables me to lift 5-6x per week without exhausting any muscle group. Monday is leg day, Tuesday shoulders & arms, Wednesday chest & back, Thursday abs, Friday legs & back. This seems to work pretty well for me, but I think if you're just starting out with lifting, the programs I mentioned above are great.

It depends...if you're working a muscular endurance lifting program it's not really going to matter much. If you're doing a strength program it's going to matter a lot because to maximize your lifts and thus your strength gains you'd want to be fresh...not really a good idea to be crawling underneath a heavy barbell after you've just run 6 miles or something.

I would highly suggest doing an actual program for best results...just willy nilly going in and randomly lifting some weights isn't going to do a whole lot for you. Follow an actual program...it will tell you what lifts to do, when to do them, when to add weight, etc.

There are reasons for one before the other and can depend on goals, but I would point out, much safer to do weights first as it is harder to keep form if already fatigued from cardio.

^^^ this. You are going to have a bad day if you drop a weight on yourself. If you get tired doing cardio, you can just stop.

Great programs on www.bodybuilding.com

Yeah.

I might do a fast mile (or two) before hitting the weight stack, but anything else elevates lactic acid and makes muscles fatigue faster than they otherwise would during my work sets.

What I recommend is cardio in the morning, strength in the evening (there's interesting science behind this too-- HGH and sleep).

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The purpose of weight training, for me, is to improve efficiency, anything more than 8 Rep Maximum sets is not going to help much, if at all, but for starting out, just getting the moves down is more important.