It all depends on your fitness goals. In a nutshell: If the primary goal is to increase aerobic endurance or lose weight, then you should perform cardiovascular exercise first. If the primary goal is to increase muscular strength, then you should perform strength training first.
There are no hard and fast rules as to which method is more successful. For complete and total health, you need to add both aerobic and anaerobic exercises to your workout routine.
The main reason to do one before the other is your time and energy reserved for the next exercise. If you do cardio first and don’t have enough time to do your weight training, then you will miss out on the benefits of resistance training and the opposite is also true.
I will generally do a short 10 minute cardio warm-up each Monday, Wednesday and Friday before doing weight training. And on Tuesday, Thursday and on the weekend I’ll do a long cardio workout and a short 10 minute muscle group focus with weights.
As I’ve blogged before, one of the major turning points in my weight loss journey was using the Myfitnesspal App to track my food intake and calorie burn.
After losing twenty pounds just tracking calories, I hit a plateau. But after reading a few helpful blogs and getting advice from athletes I knew at work, I determined that I needed to start looking at my sugar intake. That included simple sugar and carbohydrates.
To this day I stick to one big sweet treat a week and stick to my goal on the other six days. And I try to only ever eat a big carb meal if I’m going for a cardio adventure lasting more than 45 minutes within the next two days.
Myfitnesspal helps me keep track of those nutrients and macros as well as the calories. And while the base goal setting is great, my goal was to go a little more aggressive in weight loss and to begin to see more muscle tone.
After consulting again with a few pros I decided to set my carbohydrate goal down to 40% of calorie intake and set my protein goal to 30%. The base macro nutrient setting in Myfitnesspal can be updated to help with this. Below are the steps to do this in the Myfitnesspal App:
Open Myfitnesspal and click the hamburger menu button at the top left, then click on the Goals menu:
Under the Nutrition Goals section, click the option to show Carbs, Protein and Fat by meal. Then click on the calories, carbs, protein and fat goals section.
Click on Carbohydrates and change it to your desired goal and then do the same for protein. (the base goal setting has carbs at 50% of calories, to high for me)
Make sure the % adds up to 100%. That’s it.
Now Myfitnesspal will start showing you your macros for each meal and will alert you when you are going over your goals in you daily food diary.
You can also go view your full day and past day information in the Nutrition section of the diary. Click on Nutrition at the bottom of the daily food diary.
You can also click into each nutrient section to see what foods are highest in that group.
See more details on how the Nutrient goals automatically adjust based on the exercise you log in the APP by reading this post.
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It’s almost New Year’s resolution time. In an effort to help out my readers I have decided to put up a couple of weeks worth of exercises to help everyone get started.
These are basic exercises that will help you target all muscle groups throughout a week.
Each day is a new chance to tame the flesh.
Don’t cheat yourself. And don’t hurt yourself.
As you do each of these exercises, use only enough weight to barely finish the last repetition of the final set. This is debated among fitness gurus, but it worked for me starting out.
If your gym or home doesn’t have a needed machine or implement, do an exercise or body weight technique that targets the same muscle group.
In an effort to help out my readers I have decided to put up a couple of weeks worth of exercises to help everyone get started.
These are basic exercises that will help you target all muscle groups throughout a week.
Each day is a new chance to tame the flesh.
Don’t cheat yourself. And don’t hurt yourself.
As you do each of these exercises, use only enough weight to barely finish the last repetition of the final set. This is debated among fitness gurus, but it worked for me starting out.
If your gym or home doesn’t have a needed machine or implement, do an exercise or body weight technique that targets the same muscle group.
