How to organize your training routines to get the most out of them: the cardio before or after the weights?

Some of the most frequent questions about how to organize the exercises of your routine are usually: what is better before or after cardio? or what do I do basic or specific exercises first?

Prioritizing the order of one or the other exercises will lead to different muscle results, but the ideal order to structure your training will also depend on other elements or personal objectives. Today we tell you how to organize your training routines to get the most out of them.

Before focusing on particular objectives or people who perform any specific sport discipline, which could be benefited by some change in the traditional order of the exercises, we will see the general characteristics that would lead to optimal training if what we want is to combine the cardiovascular exercise within a weight routine where our fundamental objective is muscle hypertrophy.

Combine cardiovascular exercise with weights: but … before or after?

Before influencing the correct order that we should follow in our training routine, we should know the basic differences and the needs involved in performing each type of exercise , aerobic or anaerobic, to understand first hand the reason for your importance.

On the one hand, the exercise of weights or anaerobic, is a muscular work where it must prevail the high intensity of execution during a certain period of time and that is made from the glycogen and the amino acids stored in the muscle , without the need of oxygen and without pulling fat as fuel.

In contrast, in the part intended for cardio, we approach an aerobic session at a low or moderate pace, generally, where we use fat as energy and part of glycogen in the presence of oxygen.

The answer is very simple, when we perform a session of weights the energy we need is instant reclamation and this speed would not be provided by the fat used as fuel , but by glycogen. Hence the importance of reaching the weight exercises with muscle glycogen deposits butt, because if this is not so we would not complete our routine of weights in an optimal and intense way.

To give an example, if we start the training routine with the cardio session we will find the problem that part of the glycogen, besides fat, will be used as fuel for aerobic work, emptying part of these muscle glycogen deposits that We need in an integral way for a good and intense routine of weights.

Conclusion : the cardio session should always be done after weight work, otherwise we would not arrive with an optimal amount of energy to the weight training part and we would develop an anaerobic routine without the intensity and optimal duration. A big mistake if our goal is muscle hypertrophy.

What if we opted for more intense cardiovascular exercise before weights?

As we have said, when we talk about cardio in fitness we usually refer to aerobic exercise at low or moderate intensity where we basically throw in fat as fuel, which is why cardio is usually performed when the main purpose is to burn fat more instantaneously.

If we choose to do cardio at higher intensity, even reaching our anaerobic threshold and exceeding 80% of our heart rate, what we will achieve is to transform it into a purely anaerobic exercise.

In this way, if in addition to doing the cardio before the weights increase its intensity, we will end up transforming it into another anaerobic work, where we will throw practically all the stored glycogen and arriving at the work of weights without any kind of reserve. This, in addition, can lead to a muscular catabolism where we can lose part of muscle, precisely the opposite of what we are looking for.

Order of exercises in weights: First basic or specific?

Now that we know when we should practice each type of exercise, in a next post we will tell you what should be the order of exercises in the part of weights to complete an optimal training routine.