Should I Do Cardio First Or Weight Training First To Lose Weight?

Hey, good morning everybody. I want to welcome you guys to another presentation with yours truly, Patrick Ocheni, your trusted fitness expert/ advisor.

In today’s video, I’m going to answer one of your questions, and today’s question is, should I do cardio first or weight training first to lose weight?

In an ideal scenario, depending on how quickly you want to achieve result, you want to do both in the same workout.

But before I give you a definitive answer to that question, what I want to do is I want to ask you a series of questions.

The first question is, how much time do you have to work out?

That’s going to influence how you proceed in terms of your actual workout session. Do you have 30 minutes to work out a day, do you have one hour?

And the other question is, how often are you able to work out during the week? That will also determine whether or not you should be doing cardio first before your workout or you should be doing weight lifting first in order for you to lose weight.

What kind of training program are you following?

Now there are typically two types of training programs when it comes to losing weight.

There’s the first kind that I call the “body building” type of training program.

What does that mean?

That means that you go into the gym on a Monday you work on your chest, Tuesday you work on your back, Wednesday you work on your legs. So basically you isolate a certain muscle group in a given day that you focus on to help you lose weight as part of your weight training program. And then afterwards, you do cardio.

That’s your typical body building type of program. That’s one approach.

The other approach that I prefer that I do with my client is what’s called “circuit training,” whereby you combine both the lifting and the cardio into the same workout. It’s what’s also known as high intensity training. It has been proven to be the most efficient way to help you lose weight, burn fat in a very short amount of time.

If you’re following the body building type of program, generally speaking, you want to do your weight lifting first before you do your cardio because you need a lot of strength reserve to be able to maximize your workout.

The third question I have is, how much weight are you trying to lose? And, the second part to that question really is, how much time do you have yes to lose the weight? Very, very important.

If you said to me, Patrick, because of health reasons, I’m trying to lose 50 pounds in 30 days. Now, the emphasis of your program is now different.

The focus is going to shift to cardio as opposed to weight training because the urgency of the situation calls for you to lose weight as quickly as possible. So, in that scenario, you’d be doing more cardio first as opposed to weightlifting.

The other thing you want to be asking yourself is, do you care about how much strength that you lose?

If you’re somebody like me and you enjoy working out, I care about how more strength I have. I want to be able to lift heavy weights. So, that determines whether or not I put a great emphasis on my cardio program or on my weight lifting program because I don’t want to lose weight and also lose my strength. That is not what I’m interested in.

If you’re somebody that cares about how much weight you’re able to lift when it comes to losing weight, you want to put the emphasis first on your weight training as opposed to doing cardio.

Finally you want to be asking yourself, do you care about how you look or do you just want to lose weight? Do you just want to look at the scale and see that you’ve actually lost weight? For example, let’s say you started out weighing 150 pounds and all you care about is you want to weigh 130 pounds.

You don’t care how you got there or how you look at the end.

In that case, you can just put all your emphasis on doing cardio. If you do enough cardio, you will surely lose weight.

Again, you have to keep in mind, in doing so you’re going to lose strength, muscle mass, you’re going to reduce your metabolism. You should care about your metabolism, because that is responsible for how quickly you’re able to burn calories at rest.

I would not advise somebody who’s trying to lose weight to focus solely on cardio because yes, you will lose weight, but you’re going to end up becoming what’s called “skinny fat.”

What does that mean?

That means you lose weight, but you have a lot of loose skin. If you want to maintain the elasticity of your skin, look trim, look fit, strong, then I highly recommend that you put a lot of your energy into first lifting weights compared to doing cardio.

Now, it’s going to take you slightly longer, yes, to lose the weight. But, remember, this is a long-term strategy.

Now, even though this question about losing weight. Really, what we’re after is reducing body fat. So, you have to look at how you are measuring progress.

To put a definitive answer to the question, should I do cardio first or weight training first in order to lose weight? Generally speaking, the answer is you should do weight training first instead of cardio in order to lose weight.