Should You Do Cardio Or Strength Training First In Your Workout?
It’s a common question. When you get to the gym, should you do cardio or strength training first?
The answer is: it depends. Read on to find out exactly when you should do cardio first, when you should do strength training first, and when you should switch it up.
A Balanced Workout Program
If you want to live longer and decrease your risk of chronic diseases, boost your mental health, improve your mood, change your self-perception and build confidence and resilience, you should be doing a mix of cardio and strength training.
In general, you should do two or three days of strength training and two or three days of cardio each week. You should also be moving as much as possible every day.
For tips on simple ways to be more active, check out my articles: Five Ways To Sneak Movement Into Your Day and Five More Ways To Sneak Movement Into Your Day.
Ideally, I recommend doing strength training and cardio on separate days so you can give a full effort in each. That’s not always realistic, though.
Since the best workout is the one you’ll do consistently, combining your strength and cardio workouts into one session can be a good option. After all, hitting the gym three days a week is probably more do-able than six.
Should You Do Cardio Or Strength Training First?
If you’re going to combine these two types of exercise into one session, should you do cardio or strength training first?
It depends on your goals.
You should prioritize whichever type of exercise is closely related to your most important goal. Do that type of exercise first, when you’ll have the most energy and focus and can give your best effort.
For most goals, I recommend starting with strength training.
If your main goal is to get stronger, build muscle, or move better with less pain, do strength training first.
To improve your mental health and brain function, do strength training first.
To lose weight, do strength training first.
If your main goal is to improve your endurance performance (if you’re training for a 5k, triathlon, or other distance event), or if you want to improve your cardiovascular fitness, do cardio first.
To improve your general health, you can do either strength training or cardio first. Try a few sessions where you change the order and see what you like best.
If you’re just starting out and trying to build a consistent exercise habit, start with whichever type of exercise you like less and end with the type you like more.
If you need help getting started with strength training, download my FREE Strength Training 101 eBook. This guide will teach you everything you need to know, including which exercises to do, how many sets and reps, and how to progress your workouts so you get the results you want.
Benefits Of Doing Cardio First
Improving Endurance Performance
If you’re training for a cardio goal, as with any training goal, it’s important to progress your workouts over time. For cardio, that means going a little faster or a little longer in each session.
You’re more likely to achieve that if you haven’t just fatigued your muscles by lifting weights.
With a cardio goal, you’ll also want to build endurance in your muscles so they can go the distance.
When you challenge yourself with cardio, it sets off a specific set of signals inside your muscles that triggers cellular adaptations for better endurance. More blood vessels are built within your muscles so they can receive more fuel and oxygen. Your muscle cells get better at using certain enzymes to break down that fuel and use that oxygen more efficiently.
In other words, your brain hears the alarm that your muscles need more stamina, so it sends them extra resources. They use those resources to make themselves more fatigue-resistant. Over time, you become a better runner or cyclist or swimmer, or whatever you’re training for.
Warming Up For Weight Lifting
You can also use light intensity cardio as a warm-up for your strength training. If you’re just trying to get your steps in and not planning to do a hard cardio session, a light 10-minute treadmill walk would be a good warm-up before you start lifting weights.
Benefits Of Doing Strength Training First
I think there’s something special about strength training. It can make you stronger and more defined, of course, but it also improves your overall health. Having more muscle is associated with a lot of positive health outcomes.
Strength training is also particularly good at improving daily functioning, relieving pain, and increasing resilience and confidence.
It can also have a major effect on mental health, helping you to see yourself as a strong and capable person, and challenging your negative thought patterns.
If any of those are your main goal, prioritize strength training by doing it first in your gym session.
If you want to use strength training to improve your mental health, check out my Strength Training For Anxiety Program. This 12-week workout program is delivered through an app with detailed instructions and videos, so you know exactly which exercises to do and how to do them. It also has bonus features specifically designed to help you boost your mental health and manage anxiety.
With strength training, as with cardio, you need to use the principle of progressive overload if you want to get results. That means systematically increasing the difficulty of your workouts over time by lifting more weight, doing more reps with the same weight, or resting less between sets.
It’s best to do that when you’re fresh. If you do cardio first, you’ll be less physically and mentally able to push yourself in your weightlifting sets.
It’ll also be harder for you to maintain good form. That can limit the benefits you’ll get and increase your risk of injury.
Your body will also respond better to weightlifting if you do it first. That’s because of something called the “interference effect” of cardio on strength training.
The Interference Effect
The interference effect is when doing cardio before strength training interferes with an athlete’s ability to gain the maximum amount of strength or muscle.
I mentioned that when you do cardio, a specific set of signals are activated in your muscles that starts the process of making them more endurance adapted.
Lifting heavy weights activates a different set of signals.
It’s like endurance and strength are two different types of construction projects. Each needs certain materials delivered to the construction site, and the project manager needs to call for the right materials for the right job.
When your muscles are being challenged to lift something heavy, they call out to your brain that they need to get stronger. Your brain hears the call and sends the right resources to help them build more muscle. The next time you try to lift that heavy weight, you’ve gotten a little stronger and it’s a little easier.
In the interference effect, the endurance signal seems to compete with the strength signal. If you do cardio first, the endurance signal sort of turns down the volume on the strength signal, and your brain doesn’t send as many muscle-building resources.
Research studies have found that athletes build less strength and muscle when they do cardio first. Interestingly, the opposite doesn’t seem to be true. Doing strength before cardio doesn’t limit endurance-building.
The interference effect is only something to worry about if you’re an elite athlete who’s been training hard for many, many years. Even then, you can avoid the interference effect by training strength and cardio on separate days, or by leaving at least three hours between a strength and cardio session on the same day.
For the average person, and especially for beginner and even intermediate weightlifters, studies have shown very little interference effects.
Please don’t think you’re cancelling out your strength gains if you go for a jog before your lifting session. You’ll still get stronger. But if you can, it’s probably better to lift first.
Improving Body Composition
If you’re looking to burn body fat or lose weight, it’s also a better idea to do strength training first, because of the way you metabolize fuel during different types of exercise.
Your body can use three main sources of fuel during exercise: creatine, glycogen (sugar), and fat.
Creatine is mainly used during very heavy strength training, power exercises, and sprinting. The other two fuels are used during more common kinds of strength and cardio exercise.
Strength training mainly uses a stored form of sugar called glycogen. This is why strength training is so good for managing or preventing type 2 diabetes. It can also burn fat, but not as much.
Cardio exercise, depending on how long and intense it is, can use a mix of sugar and fat as a fuel. If you’ve already used up some of your sugar stores with strength training, you're more likely to burn a bigger proportion of fat during cardio.
Some studies have shown greater fat utilization when cardio is done soon after strength training.
Building muscle through strength training can also help improve your overall body composition and reduce fat. That's because muscle is more metabolically active than fat. The more muscle you have, the higher your metabolism and the more calories you’ll burn throughout the day.
Should You Do Cardio Or Strength Training First For General Health
If you don’t have a specific strength, endurance, or body composition goal and you’re just trying to lead a healthy and active life, you can improve your health by doing either cardio or strength training first.
Try it both ways and see what makes you feel best. You can also change it up from session to session. Start with cardio in some workouts and strength training in others.
Should You Do Cardio Or Strength Training First If You Struggle To Be Consistent With Your Exercise
If you’ve been on and off the fitness wagon, the most important thing is to create a consistent exercise habit. That should be your main goal.
To help with that goal, be strategic about how you structure your workouts. Use the “peak-end rule” to help with motivation and consistency.
The Peak-End Rule
The “peak-end rule” was conceptualized by Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues. It states that human beings remember an experience based on the peak of the experience and the end.
If you sit through a really boring lecture but something unexpected happens in the middle and the end is very interesting, you’re likely to remember that lecture as being interesting, even though you were bored out of your mind for most of it.
Take advantage of this phenomenon by finishing your session with the exercise you prefer.
If you like cardio better than strength training, start by lifting weights and finish with a run. If you like to lift, do you cardio first and finish with strength exercises.
When your next workout comes around, you’re more likely to remember the last one positively and be more willing to do it again.
If You Need Help
I have a few resources, like my FREE Strength Training 101 eBook and my 12-week Strength Training For Anxiety Program to assist you with your fitness journey. For one-on-one personal training, contact me! I'd be happy to help you get strong and feel great!