Fitness

Is it better to do cardio before or after weights in terms of weight loss? I play 1 hour squash with my trainer nowadays and we do 1 hour weights afterwards. Would it have any effect on how much fat I burn if we played squash after the workout? Thanks!

You may not be able to lift as much weight after a good cardio workout because your body is tired. Lifting weights doesn't exhaust the body as much, so if I'm doing both, I lift first.

It depends on the person. If I do weights first, my cardio workout sucks and I just don't last. I'm a cardio first girl. My personal trainer (when I had one) tried to convert me and eventually admitted that weights first just doesn't work as well for me.

Play with it and find what feels best for you.

I don't think the order will effect the fat burn at all and I doubt that you would want to lift before squash anyway.

Personally, I don't like doing both back to back. Either way one suffers, and there is no way I can run after doing squats, hell, I can barely walk :P

If possible, you may want to try cardio early in the day, and then weights later in the day.  I have read that by spreading the two workouts apart, your metabolism gets jumpstarted early and then the second workout helps you keep burning throughout the rest of the day.  But, it depends on your free time (and motivation!) to set up 2 separate workout times. 

 Unless you are a college-age male endurance athlete, exercise order does matter - and it's weights before cardio.

 Doing it the other way around depletes your intra-muscular glycogen stores with cardio and thus compromises the intensity you can apply to your lifting. This is not a good thing - you're compromising your results to no good purpose. Weights first will somewhat deplete intramuscular glycogen and lead to a higher fat burn during the cardio, but that is a fairly pointless consideration; your body balances out the percentage of energy from each fuel source over a 24-hour period anyway.

 But as Trhawley says, when your cardio is squash you're better off separating the two entirely - squash is mostly anaerobic interval training, and I have a hard time seeing how you could sustain the neccesary intensity by doing two anaerobic activities back-to-back.

This article says cardio before weights.

And this is why I stopped referring people to Rogers. Exercise order doesn't matter if you're a college-age male endurance athlete which is the scenario he uses in his article, but in all other cases it matters because people aren't college-age male endurance athletes don't have the glycogen reserves that a trained endurance athlete does.

 (Yes, if you're Trhawley and you're used to 3-hour bike rides you're probably in the "trained endurance athlete" category, so you can judge for yourself how close you are to being someone in the other class of people)

I tried doing weights first, and didn't have any energy left for cardio (with the same weight routine as usual). My 18-year-old brother always does weights first. But frankly, he doesn't do very intense cardio: he'll row maybe 1km afterwards, whereas I row 3 or 4 before my weights.

Maybe it depends on which you're more focused on: since my campus is large and I enjoy swimming, I'd rather have better cardio fitness, whereas he'd rather push the weights to the max.