Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights_ - Alex Hutchinson [4]
Which should I do first: cardio or weights?
Let’s start with one incontrovertible fact: you can’t fulfill your ultimate potential as both a weightlifter and a marathoner at the same time. Too many hours sweating on the elliptical will hinder your ability to put on muscle, and pumping too much iron will slow your endurance gains. But most of us don’t want Olympic medals in both events. We just want some combination of reasonable cardiovascular fitness and non-vanishing muscles—a desire shared by many elite athletes. Top basketball players, for instance, need strength and explosiveness but also have to last for a full 40 to 60 minutes on the court.
The solution, according to Derek Hansen, the head coach for strength and conditioning at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, and a speed consultant to numerous Olympic athletes, is to mix it up. For basketball players, he says, “we typically have our athletes lift weights, jump, and sprint one day, then do their aerobic work the next day.” When Hansen’s court-sport athletes are combining weight training with cardio in a single session, the weights come first, since building power is their first priority.
This approach—starting with whichever activity is most important to you—is widely used by elite athletes. Until recently, scientists thought it was simply a matter of logistics: if you’re tired from the treadmill, you can’t lift as much weight, so over time you put on less muscle. But new techniques now allow researchers to directly measure which specific proteins are produced in muscles after different types of exercises. It turns out that the sequence of cellular events that leads to bigger muscles is determined in part by the same “master switch”—an enzyme called AMP kinase—that controls adaptations for better endurance. But you can’t have it both ways: the switch is set either to “bigger muscles” or to “better endurance,” and the body can’t instantly change from one setting to the other. How you start your workout determines which way the switch will be set for the session.
So if your goal is beach muscles, your weights routine should come first. If you’re preparing for an upcoming 5K race, do your full cardio workout before tacking on weights at the end. And if you’re looking for the best of both worlds, Hansen suggests mixing it up, both within a single session and from day to day: “The variability will be good, as it challenges your body and metabolism.”
Can I get fit in seven minutes a week?
Breathless claims about exercise regimens that produce near-instant results with minimal effort are generally the domain of late-night infomercials. So it might seem surprising that one of the hot topics at the American College of Sports Medicine’s annual meeting over the last few years has been research into “high-intensity interval training” (HIT), whose proponents suggest that many of the benefits of traditional endurance training can be achieved with a few short bouts of intense exercise totaling as little as seven minutes a week.
Exercise physiologist Martin Gibala and his colleagues at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, have performed a remarkable series of studies in which their subjects cycle as hard as they can for 30 seconds, then rest for four minutes, and repeat four to six times. They do this short workout three times a week. “The gains are quite substantial,” Gibala says. Compared to control subjects who cycle continuously for up to an hour a day, five times a week, the HIT subjects show similar gains in exercise capacity, muscle metabolism, and cardiovascular fitness. In fact, the group’s latest study shows that HIT improves the structure and function of key arteries that deliver blood to the muscles and heart—just like typical cardio training. Similar studies by University of Guelph researcher Jason Talanian have found that high-intensity interval training also increases the body’s ability to burn fat, an effect