Cardio after Lifting

For the past 2 months I have been going to the gym and in my mind I have been absolutely killing it. Well in my reading and learning I have come to find out it’s been backwards as hell. I would go in and hit the treadmill for at least 20-30 minutes and then get into my weight training. Now we all know I am huge on C4 so my fatigue never really set in, or so I thought. The “way” to work out is weight train first and then cardio. Take a look at this article I found…

To achieve "shreddedness," your body needs to use your stored fat as fuel for exercise. In order to do this, you must burn off your glycogen stores first. When you weight-train, you typically use glycogen as fuel. By doing weight-training first, you can burn the majority of your glycogen stores. Knocking out your cardio after you crush the weights will burn more fat!

Simple enough but I still wanted to know more. Maybe it’s the nerd in me but I wanted to know why I had to lift first even when I felt I had plenty of energy to  keep going the way I was going. Then I stumbled across EPOC.

After a workout, your body continues to burn additional calories up to 48 hours. This is known as excess post-exercise oxygen consumption. EPOC occurs because your body needs energy to repair your muscles after you've challenged them. It occurs at a much higher rate after intense weight-training than after low-intensity, steady-state cardiovascular training; that's why it's important to put as much energy into your lifting sessions. If you do steady-state cardio before you lift, you won't have the energy to work as hard as you can. A less productive

Now it makes sense to me and I have no problem at all with this. In fact I am kind of excited to start off lifting and see how much more energy I have since it wasn’t wasted in cardio. I will have more on this by Friday in kind of a recap but I am so ready to get back in there.