cardio before or after the iron?

[solo47]

Why, exactly, do bodybuilders insists cardio should be done after pumping iron? On leg day, it has been my custom to do 20-30 minutes on the stairmaster and the leg & abdomen weights afterwards. Now I'm told I've been doing it back-asswards for these many years. Does it really matter?

Solo

 

[toughguy99]

i know when i do cardio after legs it really helps the ache .... i think it has something to do with the lactic acid your muscles store after lifting

 

[aragorn1500]

I've always done it after if at all on workout days.
One thing is, it feels like it robs me of the energy if I were to do it before a workout.

 

[dennis]

On leg day I warm up on stationary bike then maybe 10 minutes on tread mill...then I pound the legs..all I can do at that point is get to the truck/get home and then eat.There is NO WAY I could do legs and then do cardio or do much cardio at all on leg day.When I work upper body I will always start work out with cardio if I am cutting,never the other way around.When I finish upper body I am heading out the door to eat..not walk on treadmaill..just my 2 cents.

 

[xxjaredxx]

Hey Solo,
Cardio work, in my opinion, should be done after your lifts, because doing cardio beforehand can hinder your workouts. This is because when you are hitting a lot of heavy loads and lifts - you are using energy from your glycogen stores to fuel you - Hence why it is recommended sometimes for a pre/during/post-workout meal with some carbs. This is to fuel your workouts.
Now, after you have completed a really intense lift, all (most?) of your glycogen stores become depleted - so then when you switch over to H.I.I.T. (high intensity intervals) you have no more glycogen stores to be consumed. Guess what starts getting burned next for fuel? If you said fat...you are correct. I am not 100% sure but this is just the way I have trained for the past year and have had very pleasing results.

So I guess the point I am trying to make is that cardio before your lift will kill your glycogen stores - and you will not be able to optimize your lifts. Doing the opposite of the aforementioned will greatly increase your workout productivity, as you are getting a great pump, building your muscle, and then burning fat at the end of your lift.

This is just my understanding of things, I don't claim to be 100% correct - just the way I have been doing things, and seems to work pretty good for me

I hope this helps bro!

 

[PAPY2000]

wow you finally asked a question...
shazy my dear friend let me give you some sound advice that is true.
You know i'm working out to and i do my research.
1) working out should be no more the 90 min. After 90min you will just be wasting you own muscles protein and that is what we call 'over doing it'. Instead of building up you will be tearing down and you work-out was a waste.
2) you have to consume a supplement from GNC to help you either gain or lose the weight.
3) eat healthy a lot of veggies to lose weight, and a lotof carbo, and protein to gain.
4) ok after every set of weights, rest 90 sec, then do the next of 6 sets.
what im saying is we sometimes think we have to go further and do more, but that what messes us up and tear down our body. keep up the good time paste you was doing in the beginning, just add more weights, but same same same time. and let yer body rest at least 2 days. Eat bananas to potassium help rebuild muscles
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[StrongandFit]

I think most people want to use their maximum energy on the leg workout, then do cardio later.

But a cardio workout before legs could serve as an extended warmup.

In short--if it is working for you, don't worry about it.

 

[great one]

cardio after workout , because your heart rate is already up

 

[StrongandFit]

If you wanted you could try afterward and see if that works better for you. But like I said, don't worry about it what you are doing is working. Just my 2 cents.

 

[andysutils]

i always do 10 min before warmup on the treadmill and warm up the quads on the leg extensions.
I find the leg ext are the best as my legs get totally fatigued jumpin straight onto the heavy workouts and i never get this warming up with leg ext.

Doing cardio after my leg workouts is not physically possible as i can barely walk down the stairs, nevermind cardio.

 

[lovevixen]

I have done it both ways my take on it is this. use the glyogen for hoisting heavy weight not spinning your wheels on a cardio machine. If you lift heavy first your glycogen stores will be depleted before you hop on the cardio machine so by effect you will have nothing left but fat to burn unless your liver decides to use some of it's reserves of glycogen.

On the other hand if you do your cardio first you can not lift any where near as heavy or for as many sets so unless you desire to be better at cardio then you are lifting heavy iron it does not make much sense.

I do not benifit much from warming up first what is the point of doing cardio to warm up if you are still going to do a warm up set on your first exercise? I should add that I have been lifting weights since 1982 and the only time I have been hurt lifting weights is when a candy wrapper some one pitched got stuck tot he bottom of my shoe and I slipped while squatting. I tried to save the lift and ended up with a compression injury to my spine. That was back in 1988. I think the fact that I do not waste time with more then one warm up set and I stop before I am so fatigued that my form breaks down is the reason I have never suffered an injury. Most bodybuilders get hurt once they are fatigued and often when trying to go to failure late in the workout.....So I am against anything that makes you fatigued prior to hoisting heavy iron. Save the cardio for after the heavy lifting almost no one get's hurt doing cardio because the load is light and the worst thing that could happen to you is you fall of the machine!


Plus to doing cardio after a workout is that it flush's all the junk out of the muscles and reduces sorness!

 

[jasthace]

On leg day I warm up on stationary bike then maybe 10 minutes on tread mill...then I pound the legs..all I can do at that point is get to the truck/get home and then eat.There is NO WAY I could do legs and then do cardio or do much cardio at all on leg day.When I work upper body I will always start work out with cardio if I am cutting,never the other way around.When I finish upper body I am heading out the door to eat..not walk on treadmaill..just my 2 cents.

Same for me

But i do do five minutes of treadmill in between body parts if I am too fucked up.For a break,to get my breath back, before going hard-out on the next body part.

If I am going to do a serious cutting cycle, I do cardio sessions independent of weights{in the morning}

 

[lovevixen]

I understand their are days when we all skipp the cardio becasue we have done a marathon workout of went so deep into our reserves that our blood sugar is crashing etc.....

One way I solved that problem is when I went to HIIT cardio. With Tabata style cardio I only needed to do cardio twice a week to reccieve the same benifit that I used to get from doing 60 minutes of cardio a day. In fact I got leaner and bigger by dropping daily cardio in favor of HIIT cardio. It then makes it easy to design your workouts with the idea that two times a week out of 7 days you are going to do a tabata style HIIT cardio workout at the end. So it is easy to plan it for either an easy or medium day or an upper body day etc........

It also works well when doing low volume workouts like 5x5 or PTP etc......

 

[Gstack80]

Ive try both and I feel that if I leave cardio last I wont do it so I had to switch over to doing cardio first and it really didnt effect my sets at all. As a matter of fact I feel a lot better doing it first because I feel it takes a little of the pump away!

 

[Helomech74]

I always do it after the weights. I was always taught that lifting weights will deplete your glycogen stores for energy, so when you do cardio afterwards you would more generally burn fat for fuel. Of course how much truth there is to this I don't know. I was this from high school, college and even still today. When I started back in the gym last year I did it this way and I have burned off over 78 pounds of fat to date. I don't do steady state cardio though, I have always done HIIT training as it seems to produce better results for me. I usually finish with about 40-45 minutes of cardio at the end of my workout.

 

[bigpapabuff]

I always go with the cardio last.

 

[tballz]

It's better to do it after lifting so you have more energy for the weights and also your metabolism is already cranked up when you hit the cardio.

 

[toothache]

What's cardio?

 

[bigbench]

After, done!

 

[dennis]

After heavy session of weight lifting you need to go eat..not do cardio!