Cardio Before Or After Your Workout?

 In order to understand what you should or shouldn't do, you have to dive into the science, enzymes and the physiology of a human body.When our body needs glucose then our glycogen stores get depleted. Cardio and lifting both needs these glycogen stores or else the performance suffers. Even though lifting only uses 1/3rd or 30 per cent of the glycogen stores, it will still suffer if it is depleted because lifting needs a quick burst of energy primarily provided by glucose.Cardio is slow and steady which is better suited in a slow and steady breakdown of fat for energy. Glycogen is still important but you can train your body to adapt with lower glycogen levels when doing steady state cardio.So, we can say that when you're doing your cardio, you're utilizing fat as a source of fuel and very little glucose, and when you're doing High-Intensity Interval Training or any kind of weight training, you're using stored carbs (in the form of glycogen) as a main source of energy and far less fat.

m-Tor and AMPK

However, I believe in doing your cardio post-workout, and I'll explain to you some reasons why it should be like that.Let’s study about the impact of enzymes known as m-Tor and AMPK.Mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR) integrates the input from amino acids and insulin. mTOR is what is responsible for building muscle and elevates quickly after resistance training.Another enzyme 5'-adenosine monophosphate protein kinase (AMPK) plays a role in cellular energy homeostasis.AMPK is said to be activated via lower intensity exercise like cardio and for the increase in fat breakdown, unfortunately, it also inhibits m-Tor signalling which in theory means if you do cardio first muscle growth diminishes, but it is just a theory and AMPK effects last for only 15-20 minutes after cardio and sometimes not at all. m-Tor, in contrast, can be elevated for as long as 48 hours after training.

What’s your goal?

But by far the most important factor here is fatigue. The goal of any resistance training exercise is progressive overload A.K.A gradually increasing resistance from exercise to exercise. To achieve this, you will have to perform when you are at your strongest.If you do cardio exercise before resistance training or lifting there can be residual muscle fatigue which compromises muscle force production. You may also have mental fatigue which can dampen focus and motivation. Simply said you just can’t perform well.Lifting first will not impact your cardio much, because cardio doesn’t demand as much as lifting especially steady state cardio. Plus, by the time you go from lifting to cardio the type 1 fibres needed for cardio should be recovered enough to last you a while.If you can split your exercise in different days or different times of the day that will allow better recovery and overall better performance for both, just don’t overdo it.

Final Conclusion

If you want to get better in any given quality, then you should do that in the beginning of the training session when you are feeling fresh. So doing cardio first will led to improve the measure of endurance and doing weight training first led to the improved measure of strength and size. So if your goal is to get better in cardio do your cardio first and if it is to get bigger and stronger, do your weight first.Doing some amount of cardio before training is good for preventing any injury risk and for increasing performance. This may last for a 10 minutes or more of low intensity steady state cardio.Finally doing cardio after weight may be good for fat loss but remember it may be true that you may be burning more fat in that particular cardio session after weight training, but it has minimum difference overall in your body throughout the day.  What really matter for fat loss is a 24 hours or longer energy balance.I think that in practice it may be better to space your cardio apart from weight training. My personal recommendation is to have cardio after weight training and do have at least one meal (preferably carbs snacks or liquid meal) before weight training and cardio to increase the overall performance. 

Note: this article is from own website theholisticwellbeing

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