Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights_ - Alex Hutchinson [31]
Thanks to public health messages, we’ve all heard about the benefits of exercise: reduced risk of heart disease, diabetes, and arthritis; longer life; lower weight; less stress, less depression, and increased cognitive function. It’s important to realize that it’s aerobic fitness, not strength training, that is most closely tied to all these good outcomes. If the health benefits don’t convince you, the performance benefits should—even in sports where you wouldn’t expect it. A 2009 study of snowboarders on the World Cup circuit, for instance, found that aerobic fitness as measured on a stationary bicycle was one of the most reliable predictors of finishing position. Even golf, the butt of jokes about athleticism, shows the same pattern: a 2009 study of the physical and physiological characteristics of 24 golfers on the Canadian national team found a strong correlation between aerobic fitness in a running test and tournament performance. Whatever the activity, you can practice harder and keep performing at your best for longer if you’re aerobically fit.
This doesn’t mean that you’re doomed to a lifetime of treadmills and stair-machines. During a competitive soccer game, for example, players work at about 70 percent of their VO2max, well above the minimum of about 50 percent needed for an effective aerobic workout. Baseball and football, on the other hand, have too much standing around to offer much benefit. For any sport, the benefits depend on how vigorously and how continuously you play.
Some people focused on weight lifting have turned to “circuit training” as an aerobic alternative. This popular form of weight training involves moving rapidly from one strength exercise to the next with only a few seconds of rest, in an attempt to keep the heart rate high enough to get both aerobic and muscular benefits. Unfortunately, studies over the last 30 years have consistently found that circuit training typically makes people work at a little less than 50 percent of their VO2max. Of course, this isn’t an iron-clad rule. It’s possible to get an aerobic workout from a circuit routine if you keep the intensity high enough and the recovery times short enough. This is the approach taken by popular all-around exercise regimens like CrossFit, and it’s perfectly reasonable as long as you maintain a consistently high intensity that’s nearly nonstop.
The bottom line: yes, you need to do aerobic exercise, no matter what your sports performance or health goals are. You can fit it in by doing a 10- to 15-minute stint on a cardio machine after lifting weights, by playing sports, or by setting aside a couple of workouts a week to focus on cardio. You don’t have to go jogging—but it should feel like you did.
How hard should my cardio workout feel?
One of the easiest mistakes new exercisers can make is to be overzealous—to jack the treadmill up to maximum velocity until they get spat out the back, and repeat that every day until they’re too discouraged and exhausted (and possibly injured) to continue. Of course, it’s just as possible to be underzealous, flipping through a magazine while absent-mindedly turning the pedals of the exercise bike at a glacial pace. Ideally, you want to be somewhere between these extremes—but where, exactly?
For aerobic exercise, you can divide efforts into three basic zones on the basis of how your body reacts. The easiest is the aerobic zone, where your heart and lungs are able to deliver enough oxygen to your muscles to keep them functioning. In contrast, the hardest, or anaerobic, zone is where your muscles can’t get enough oxygen. In between is the threshold zone, which is marked by