Ep. #352: Should You Do Cardio or Weightlifting First? What 20 Studies Say

This episode is brought to you by me. Seriously, though, I’m not big on promoting stuff that I don’t personally use and believe in. So instead, I’m going to just quickly tell you about something of mine. Specifically, my fitness book for men, Bigger, Leaner, Stronger. Now this book has sold over 350, 000 copies in the last several years and helped thousands and thousands of guys build their best bodies ever, which is why it currently has over 3, 100 reviews on Amazon with a four and a half star average.

So if you want to know the biggest lies and myths that are keeping you from achieving the lean, muscular, strong, and healthy body that you truly desire, and if you want to learn the simple science of building the ultimate male body. Then you want to read bigger, leaner, stronger, which you can find on all major online retailers like Amazon, Audible, iTunes, Kobo, and Google play.

Now, speaking of audible, I should also mention that you can get the audio book, 100 percent free. When you sign up for an audible account, which I highly recommend that you do, if you’re not currently listening to audio books, I love them myself because they let me make the time that I spend doing stuff like commuting, prepping food, walking my dog and so forth so much more valuable and productive.

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For now, at least let’s get to the show. Hey, Mike Matthews here from muscle for life and Legion athletics. And in this video podcast, I want to answer a simple question that I am asked fairly often, and that is, should you do your weightlifting or your cardio workouts first? In other words, you are going to do both some weightlifting and some cardio in the same gym session, the same workout session.

How should you go about it? Some people say that you should start with your cardio because it’s a good way to warm up. And cardio, especially intense cardio, is particularly hard after weightlifting and after intense weightlifting. Now, other people say that you should do your weightlifting first because you want to be as fresh as possible for those workouts.

You want to have as much energy to give them as possible. And if you waste some of that energy or you use up some of that energy on your cardio, then you are not going to be able to progress as easily or as quickly in your lifting. Now other people still say it doesn’t really matter practically speaking, it doesn’t matter.

Just do whatever you like most. So who’s right? It my answer short and sweet, and then I’ll get into why is that if your goal is to gain muscle and strength as quickly as possible, you want to do your weightlifting first. And in fact, if you really want to gain muscle and strength as quickly as possible, then you want to do as little cardio as possible.

In addition to the timing of it, you also want to keep your cardio to a minimum for two reasons. So the first reason is cardio Is fatiguing. And the more cardio you generally do, the more general fatigue you are going to experience. And that is going to make it harder to progress in your weightlifting workouts.

And reason number two is more of a longterm reason. There is research that shows that cardiovascular exercise interferes with some of the cellular signaling related to muscle building. So what that means is that the more cardio you do the more impaired your body’s muscle building machinery is.

And even if the effects are fairly slight They can add up to a significant reduction in muscle and strength gain over the long term. A simple way to look at this is simply that resistance training and cardiovascular exercise send very different signals to the muscles in terms of what type of adaptation is supposed to occur.

And so for example, if you want maximum Strength gain and maximum hypertrophy, if that’s the adaptation that you’re going for, you want to send as clear of a signal over and over to those muscles as possible. And that is the signal that resistance training produces. Now, cardiovascular exercise sends a very different message to the muscles in terms of how they should respond to the stress.

Getting bigger and stronger wouldn’t be an appropriate response because it would not help you run more miles. In fact, it would get in the way of your ability to run more miles because you’d be carrying more weight and you’d have a lot of muscle that is optimized for producing more muscle. A lot of force quickly, as opposed to muscles that are very resistant to fatigue and can contract repeatedly for long periods of time without crapping out.

And while we are on the topic of cardio and muscle building generally, it’s worth noting that several studies have shown that the longer your cardio sessions are, the greater the interference effect is. And that is simply a technical term, by the way, for. Cardio’s negative effects on muscle building interference effect is how it is referred to in the scientific literature now All that does not mean that you should not do any cardio if you want to get jacked There are a few good reasons to do cardio Even if your goal is to gain muscle and strength as quickly as possible Now, the first one is research shows that cardiovascular exercise can provide some health benefits that we probably can’t get from resistance training alone.

And they are primarily cardiovascular in nature, big surprise. So while we do know that resistance training is good for our heart health, there’s some evidence that doing some cardio in addition to the resistance training is even better for our hearts. The second reason is there is evidence that improving your cardiovascular fitness can also improve your recovery times in between your resistance training sets.

So let’s say that you normally need to take two or three minutes to feel ready to go. Give it your all in your next set, where your heart rate has come back down into a normal range. You’re not breathing too heavily anymore and you just feel generally ready to go. If it takes again, two or three minutes currently, if you were to improve your cardiovascular fitness, there’s a good chance that you might be able to shave, let’s say 30 seconds off of that, which you then could use to get more work done in the time that you have for your resistance training workouts.

And the third reason why meat heads should consider including cardio in their routine, whether they are cutting, bulking or maintaining is when you’re cutting, it helps you burn fat faster, of course, because it simply increases energy expenditure. And especially in the case of something like high intensity interval training.

And I’ve written about that and spoken about that extensively, so I won’t go off on that tangent. If you want to maximize fat loss, do some hit. Maybe an hour and a half, two hours max per week. And if you don’t want to do that for whatever reason, I would recommend going to the opposite end of the spectrum and simply adding some walking in your routine.

And the reason being is walking burns three to 400 calories per hour and is very low fat. Stress. It’s very low impact. It is not going to cut into your recovery and it is not going to interfere much if at all with your resistance training. So that interference effect, and this has been shown in studies, the interference effect in the case of walking is basically non existent.

It’s when you get into stuff like jogging, you get to that level of intensity, regardless of the modalities, when you start to see it more. And as far as maintaining and lean bulking goes, including cardio in your routine, again, even if it’s something as simple as a few hours of walking per week, it can, there’s evidence that it can help mitigate.

fat gain. It can make you more resistant to fat gain primarily by improving your body’s improving your muscles ability to burn fat for energy. And by the same token, by keeping your body’s fat burning machinery running well, so to speak, including cardio in your maintenance and or lean bulking routines can also make your cuts faster.

You can shave off probably a couple of weeks from your post maintenance or. Post Lean Bulk Cuts. Hey, if you like what I am doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider supporting my sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics, which produces 100 percent natural evidence based health and fitness supplements, including protein powders and bars, pre workout and post workout supplements.

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So again, the URL is legionathletics. com. And if you appreciate my work and want to see more of it, please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love, like producing podcasts like this. All right. Now that we have all that under our belts, let’s finish where we began with the primary question of this video podcast, which is, should you do weightlifting or cardio first?

Now I said that you should do your weightlifting first, and now I want to quickly explain why. Now, physiologically speaking, muscle growth is initiated primarily by a number of anabolic signals that occur after your resistance training workouts. And you can think of these signals as switches. Now as you’ve learned, cardio can interfere with some of these switches, make it harder to turn them on or even turn some of these switches off.

Now that information has led to a theory that it would be better to do cardio before your weightlifting or before your resistance training because it’s the resistance training that turns those anabolic switches on. And if cardio can interfere with that, then do it when those switches are off, which would be before your resistance training workout.

So you just get it outta the way, and then you are free to do your resistance training workout, and then. And those anabolic signals can kick in unimpeded by the cardio. And if you flip it around, these people say that you are basically first doing the resistance training and then you’re starting up your body’s muscle building machinery and the processes begin and then you do the cardio and it interferes with all that.

And it’s a reasonable theory, definitely worth investigating, but I do not support it for two reasons. The first one is that while research shows that longer 30 plus minute cardio workouts most definitely impair with the post workout anabolic signaling we just spoke about, shorter Cardio workouts like under 30 minutes, and if you want to be real safe, 20 minutes or less do not seem to have these same effects.

And the second reason is something I mentioned a little bit earlier, and that is just general energy levels and general fatigue levels. So if the cardio that you’re doing is at least a moderate intensity and you’re doing at least 20 minutes of it, that is going to get in the way of your weightlifting workouts to some degree.

If you were to do your. Weightlifting first, you will have a better workout than if you were to do it after 20 to 30 minutes of moderate or higher intensity cardio. And because mechanical tension is the primary. The mechanical driver of muscle growth and progressive overload is the best way to subject your muscles to more and more mechanical tension.

And of course, what that really comes down to is getting stronger over time progressing. I spoke a Couple podcast episodes ago about double progression, a simple model that I like to use, but regardless of whatever model you’re using, it is going to involve lifting heavier weights in a given rep range over time.

And that is your primary goal in your resistance training workouts. So anything that gets in the way of that. Is going to significantly hinder muscle and strength gain. So when you consider all that, there is a significant downside to doing your cardio before your resistance training or before your weightlifting, which is slower progress in your resistance training and no real downside to doing it after because if you keep it short, which I would recommend anyway, you are not going to interfere with those post workout anabolic signals to any market degree.

And that is not just theory either. This has actually been demonstrated in a number of scientific studies. For example, one was published in 2016 and it was conducted by scientists at the University of Uvescula. And what they did is they took 42 men and they split them up into four groups. Group one was morning cardio followed by weightlifting.

Group two was morning weightlifting. Followed by cardio group three was evening cardio followed by weightlifting and group four was evening weightlifting followed by cardio and everybody did the same workouts for the cardio workouts. It was some medium intensity stuff as well as some high intensity stuff.

And for the. Resistance training for the weightlifting. It was some full body workouts that progressed from lighter to heavier weights throughout the duration of the study. And after 24 weeks, what the researchers found is that the people who did their weightlifting first gained a bit more strength over that period.

Then the people who did their cardio first. So if you can do your cardio workouts after your resistance training workouts, and you will minimize the cardio is negative effects on your muscle building and your strength game. Even better than that, I should note before we wrap up here is doing your cardio and your resistance training workouts on different days.

And if that’s not possible, separating them by at least six hours. And the reason being is a couple of studies have shown that separating your resistance training and your cardio workouts by anywhere from six to 24 hours can help further mitigate the interference effect and thereby maximize the anabolic response from your resistance training workouts.

So for example, what I do is when I have lifting and cardio on the same day, I’m going to Which I only really do when I cut, by the way, I’m maintaining. And currently I do cardio twice per week. I do it on Saturday and Sunday, but I’m not lifting on those days. I live to Monday through Friday. Sometimes I’ll throw in an extra cardio session sometime in the week, but usually it’s a five days of lifting in two days of cardio when I’m maintaining and lean bulking, but when I’m cutting, I get up to four cardio sessions per week, which means of course I have to do a couple.

On the days that I’m lifting and on those days, what I do is I lift first thing in the morning, I go down the street and go to a gym and do my weightlifting workout. And then I do the cardio at night. So the weightlifting workout maybe starts at seven, seven 30. And then 12 hours or so later, I’m doing my cardio and I do it here at my house.

I have a, an indoor bike downstairs and I just do my cardio after work. Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and don’t mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you’re listening from.

This not only convinces people that they should check the show out, it also increases its search visibility. And thus helps more people find their way to me and learn how to build their best bodies ever too. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then just subscribe to the podcast and you won’t miss out on any of the new goodies.

Lastly, if you didn’t like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at mike at muscle for life. com and share your thoughts on how you think it could be better. I read everything myself and I’m always looking for constructive feedback. So please do reach out. All right, that’s it. Thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.

And lastly, this episode is brought to you by me. Seriously though, I’m not big on promoting stuff that I don’t personally use and believe in, so instead I’m going to just quickly tell you about something of mine. Specifically, my fitness book for men, Bigger, Leaner, Stronger. Now this book has sold over 350, 000 copies in the last several years and helped thousands and thousands of guys build their best bodies ever, which is why it currently has over 3, 100 reviews on Amazon with a.

Four and a half star average. So if you want to know the biggest lies and myths that are keeping you from achieving the lean, muscular, strong, and healthy body that you truly desire. And if you want to learn the simple science of building the ultimate male body, then you want to read this book. Bigger, leaner, stronger, which you can find on all major online retailers like Amazon, Audible, iTunes, Kobo, and Google play.

Now, speaking of Audible, I should also mention that you can get the audio book 100 percent free. When you sign up for an audible account, which I highly recommend that you do, if you’re not currently listening to audio books, I love them myself because they let me make the time that I spend doing stuff like commuting, prepping food, walking my dog and so forth so much more valuable and productive.

So if you want to take Audible up on this offer and get my book for free, then simply go to www.bitlybitly.com/free BBLs, and that will take you to Audible and then you just click the sign up today and Save button, create your account. And voila, you get to listen to Bigger, leaner, stronger for Free.