May 27, 2019
How To Combine Cardio and Strength Training
Want to increase your fat-burning potential? Combine cardio and strength training.
Think of strength training and cardio as a classic duo like peanut butter and jelly. While they’re good individually, they’re even better together!
Benefits of Cardio
Cardio exercise helps improve your body’s ability to deliver blood and oxygen to your muscles, strengthening your heart and lungs. This process builds up your endurance through training your muscles to better utilize oxygen. Regular cardio lowers blood pressure, body fat, regulates blood sugar levels and reduces inflammation.
In the long term, regular aerobic (cardio) exercise can also reduce your risk of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and cancer. It can also improve your memory and protect the brain against age-related cognitive decline.
Pro tip: Aim for about 150 minutes of moderate cardio exercise per week. This can include brisk walking, swimming, jogging, cycling, dancing, or Seven workouts.
Benefits of Strength
Strength training helps you build muscles that support you in your everyday life, boosts your metabolism and improves the body’s ability to burn fat in the long run. Strengthening your muscles makes you feel stronger, stimulates bone growth, assists with weight control, improves balance, posture and can reduce pain in the lower back and joints.
The Dynamic Duo
Get the health-boosting benefits of combining cardio and strength training with these tips:
1. Increase the pace of your workout
If you normally do strength training, add some cardio to it by taking shorter breaks, or moving during your rest intervals.
You could reduce your rest time between sets to 45 seconds, or do a basic exercise like running in place while you recover. This keeps your heart rate high, automatically increasing the cardio required in your strength session.
2. Add weight and do more reps
Adding some weight and doing more reps can make your workouts more intense. This also increases your heart rate and promotes faster muscle fatigue, so that your workout can be considered both a cardio and strength session.
3. Alternate between cardio and strength training
If you workout 5 times per week for 30 minutes, aim to alternate your workouts between cardio and strength training. This will help you reap the benefits of both types of training, and keep your body guessing and adapting to the different workouts.
In practice, this might look like scheduling cardio on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and completing your strength training on Tuesday and Thursdays.
4. Include a cardio burnout round
Add a round of cardio to the end of your strength sets with a 7 minute workout or short sprint.
Remember: always do cardio at the end of your session, rather than before strength training. This because cardio workouts can deplete your energy for lifting and can therefore negatively impact your form.
