Cardio vs Strength Training

I think it depends on if you're a man or woman...For women when they do strength training they're goal is to tone up not really build it whereas for men most of them want to build their muscles. With that said I've been told that doing cardio before a workout will help you burn fat more during weight lifting since your heart rate is already up after a cardio workout which means you're burning more calories during your strengthening exercises. I've also heard that when toning up you want to burn out on lower weights than use really heavy weights like men do. Again this will increase your heart rate and burn more calories.

Hope that helps you...Good Luck!

It's generally best to do strength training first. You can do 5-10 minutes of cardio first, however to warm up your muscles.

For the average person it doesn't make any difference. It boils down to personal preference and how your body responds to different types of exercise.

If you want to perform best at cardio, do cardio first. If you feel that doing cardio first makes you too tired to perform at your best when lifting, then lift first.

There are no absolutes (actually, the only "absolute" is that there are no absolutes).

Two things are often left out of this discussion. First: If they are focused and consistent. beginners will make substantial gains doing almost anything in any order. The small differences that might exist will be overwhelmed by the large increases that will occur as a matter of course. Advanced/trained exercisers should have enough knowledge and self-awareness to understand that what is appropriate to "them" is often irrelevant to beginners. Second: people can adapt to a lot of different routines. If you prefer to do cardio first, you can develop the ability to maintain productive strength workouts as well.

As a rule, I avoid using personal anecdotes, but I am going to describe my experiences, not because I think they "prove" anything, but just as an example of what I am talking about.

I do cardio first for two reasons: one, I prefer doing cardio and so I want to have my maximum energy for my cardio workouts; two, for whatever reason, if I do strength first I have absolutely nothing left for cardio. That's my personal preference and it means absolutely nothing for anyone else. I have developed the ability do 30-45 min hard cardio sessions followed by strength workouts at a 4-6RM intensity. I have no problems with form following a hard cardio workout.

Is my lifting performance as good as it could be if I didn't do the cardio first? Almost certainly not. It's just a question of balance. If I do cardio first, I can do a 90%-100% quality cardio workout followed by an 85%-90% strength workout. If I tried the opposite, it would be more like a 90%-100% quality strength workout and a 40% quality cardio. So I give a little on one end to get back more on the other.

Again, there is nothing special about what I do and there is no right or wrong answer to this question. I just focus on two points: one is that there are no absolute right or wrong answers on this topic and two is that, even if there was a small proveable benefit in doing one first over the other, for beginners it has zero relevance.

Fuel substrate use matters little relative to fat loss. Heck, the greatest percentage of fat is burned at low intensities of activity, so following that logic, why not sit your way to fat loss?

Fuel substrate use matters little relative to fat loss. Heck, the greatest percentage of fat is burned at low intensities of activity, so following that logic, why not sit your way to fat loss?

Oh man, if only. *sigh*

Basically, the article was just citing info from a study done in Tokyo where the people who lifted first burned 10% more fat during the cardio session than the people who did cardio alone. I take most things I read on the internet with a grain of salt, but since I read it in two different articles (I think the other was in Women's Health) I figured why not.

A literature review published in 2009 pointed out the weak link in a lot of these studies. The main problem is that they look only at what happens during the exercise workout itself and not what happens the rest of the day.

There are a number of things you can do --both right before a workout and as a result of longer-term training adaptations--to increase the amount of fat burned during a workout. That has been shown numerous times.

However when you look at 24 fat oxidation (which is really what counts, not what happens in a 45 min workout), the research reported that there was no difference in total fat oxidation between those who burned more fat during their exercise workout and those who burned less. In essence, in response to what occurred during the workout, the body burned more or less fat throughout the day, so that after 24 hrs, total fat oxidation and percentage of fat burned as a fuel showed no significant difference.

That has led me to become very skeptical about any study that shows any acute change during exercise and then tries to generalize those results to a long-term permanent effect.

Back to your original citation: There are also studies that show a greater elevated post oxygen consumption (EPOC) in subjects who do cardio first followed by resistance training. So, it's like which do you want -- more fat burned during the workout or more calories burned AFTER the workout?

That's meant to be rhetorical. For the record, I wouldn't pay any attention to either result--especially since those small changes mean almost nothing to the average exerciser/dieter.

Fuel substrate use matters little relative to fat loss. Heck, the greatest percentage of fat is burned at low intensities of activity, so following that logic, why not sit your way to fat loss?