Cardio and strength training
Cardiovascular activity not only burns calories during the
exercise, it also increases your metabolism to burn fat when you are at
rest.
How much cardio should you perform?
If your aim is to burn fat and lose weight then aim for at least four
sessions of medium to high intensity cardio workouts a week. If you want to
build muscle as well as hold off fat, you should only do one or two. If all
you want is to build muscle you can hold off the cardio altogether.
How intense should your cardio workout be?
Long lasting, medium intensity cardio causes your body to lose fat and a
small amount of muscle. Short, high intensity cardio causes your body to
lose fat but preserves more muscle. Long lasting, low intensity cardio does
not cause many changes at all. So, to help your strength training, the best
cardio to perform is shorter, higher intensity workouts. this is because
your body thinks it needs muscle to cope with the high intensity, whereas
the lower intensity, long lasting exercise causes your body to think it
needs to lose some bulk (i.e. muscle as well as fat!)
Diet and cardio
When performing cardio it is essential that you get plenty of
calories.
If you don’t feed your body enough food, your metabolism will slow down to
make up for what your body sees as starvation during a physically hard time.
It tries to hold on to fat for protection. Give it food and it will know it
can happily lose the fat and still flourish.
When to perform cardio
You should do your cardio workout whenever you feel most energetic. It is
best to have a small meal about an hour beforehand. You should not do cardio
on a full stomach, not only because this would be uncomfortable and give you
a stomach ache or the stitch, but also because you need to give your body
time for the insulin levels to drop (insulin is releases after eating,
especially carbs) as insulin interferes with growth hormone secretion -
essential for development, repair and growth of muscle.
Why you should eat breakfast before a morning workout
You should also not do cardio on a totally empty stomach when you are
hungry, for example, after having just got up. After sleeping, your body is
not warmed up enough to do a beneficial cardio session and it lacks energy
and is more likely to suffer injury and slow down metabolism. Contrary to
popular belief, you won’t burn more fat first thing in a morning, you may
actually lose muscle due to your body being in a slight catabolic state on
no food. Breakfast revs up your metabolism and gives you the energy you need
to benefit from cardio.
Combining cardio with weights
Ideally you should do cardio and weight workouts on different days. However,
if you want to do them on the same day in the same workout, it is best to
perform weights first, after warming up with a little light cardio.
Intensity is more critical to weight training than to cardio. This is why
you need most of your strength still in your muscles for effective weights,
not used up by the cardio.
In a little more detail...
Why you should do weights before cardio
You body uses two kinds of energy - glycogen and fat. Weight training is
a short burst, high intensity anaerobic exercise, which can only use
glycogen for fuel. In contrast, cardio is a longer lasting exercise which
uses fat as well as glycogen for fuel.
If you do your weights first, this depletes your glycogen reserves,
leaving just fat to be used by your cardio workout. This is what we want to
reduce fat and build muscle.
But if we do cardio first, the body will always choose to bur glycogen
rather than fat (it likes to store fat in case of a starvation emergency) so
the cardio will use up your glycogen, leaving nothing left for the muscles
to use in your weight workout, as they can’t use fat for fuel.
Muscles too tired for cardio?
Unfortunately, some people find their muscles feel too tired after a good
weights session to be able to do a cardio workout afterwards. This can be
avoided by steering clear of leg workouts before a cardio session and
concentrating on arms that day. Also, the stronger you become, the more you
will be able to do and, when your legs get stronger, you won’t find cardio after weights so
difficult.
