Breakthrough Limits With Your Exercise Training
What are you looking for, that’s the question? Looking to take your workouts to the next level? Want to increase endurance, burn fat faster, and live a healthier, fitter lifestyle?
If you’ve never been thinking of combining cardio and strength training, now is the time!
Before getting straight to the main course, it is crucial to understand the difference between both types of exercises.
Benefits of Combining Strength and Cardio Training
Different types of training deal with the different aspects and work differently in ways. Well, if you combine cardio and strength training, one complements the other and helps you achieve gains that you couldn’t accomplish by depending on only one type of exercise.
Let’s discuss them both separately to figure out the benefits they are offering individually.
Benefits of Cardio:
Cardio and aerobic exercise helps improve your body’s ability to deliver blood and oxygen to your muscles, as well as it strengthens your heart and lungs.
This process builds up your endurance by training your muscles to better utilize oxygen. Doing cardio exercise daily helps to lower your body fat, controls blood pressure, reduces inflammation, and regulates blood sugar levels.
Cardio workout offers a lot of long-term benefits as well. Regular cardio (aerobic) exercise can also reduce your risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, and stroke. It helps improve your memory and protect the brain against age-related cognitive decline.
Benefits of Strength:
Strength training, whereas, is an example of anaerobic exercise. However, it involves a short burst of intensive movements, while only burning carbohydrates for energy.
Strength training helps you build muscles that support you in your everyday life or routine movements, boosts your metabolism, and improves your body’s agility to burn fat in the long run.
Strengthening your muscles makes you feel stronger, stimulates bone growth, assists in controlling weight improves balance, posture and can help reduce pain in the lower back and joints.
Let’s dive deeper into this and try to get to know about the further benefits of combining cardio and strength training.
The Benefits of the Dynamic Duo:
Mostly, a strength training workout routine includes barbell strength training and weight machines.
The purpose of strength training is to build muscle, however, building muscle through barbell and weight machines begins with breaking down your muscles. After a strength training session, rest is required for the muscles to rebuild and grow.
Therefore, it is the rest after strength training that builds muscle, rather than the strength training itself.
Cardiovascular activities are those activities like swimming, running, and cycling, that get the heart pumping. This cardio exercise action the heart and blood vessels by improving their overall health and reducing their susceptibility to high blood pressure and heart attacks.
Except for only improving heart health, cardio workouts burn excessive calories and improve endurance.
There is very little overlap among the benefits of cardio and strength training. The best way to realize all the benefits of exercise is to engage in a combination of exercises.
Effects of Applied Strength and Cardio Training
Pro Tips:
Alternate between cardio and strength training: Let’s suppose you work out five times a week for 30 minutes each time. You can practice alternating the workouts from cardio to strength training and back again to get the benefits of both types of training every week.
For example, Monday, Wednesday, Friday (cardio), and Tuesday and Thursday (Strength Training).
With a 7-minute workout or a quick run, add a round of cardio to the end of your weight sessions. Rather than doing cardio before strength training, do it at the end of your workout.
This is due to the fact that cardio activities deplete your energy for lifting, which might have a negative impact on your form.
As mentioned above in this article, cardio helps to build endurance that includes those muscles you build with barbell strength training. Through cardio blood and oxygen are delivered more efficiently to those muscles, they improve their ability to build and recover.
For those who train to build muscle, this means that muscle builds faster when combining cardio with strength training.
For those who focus on cardio, combining cardio with strength training means that your average power output and peak power output increase. This means that if you spend some time working on your leg muscles, your sprint at the finish of a road race will likely improve.
Rest days are required for both strength training and cardio. Because strength training and cardio work various muscles in different ways, your cardio rest day could include weight lifting while your strength training rest day could include jogging, swimming, bicycling, or another cardio activity.
Alternating weight training and cardio on rest days will result in better and more peaceful sleep than doing nothing. Your exhausted muscles will require recuperation to repair and strengthen after your strength training days.
Your body is aware of this and will use sleep to relax those muscles. 60% of those who strength train sleep for 7 hours or longer every night on average.
Your energy levels will naturally dip on workout days as your body burns consumed calories and fat deposits. Your body will simply run out of energy and will need to sleep to recover.
In either scenario, your body will look after itself by getting the rest it needs.
Overtraining raises the chance of injury significantly. Pulling on an elastic band after it has already been stretched is like training before your body has healed and rebuilt.
Stretching it further will break it because it has not been allowed to recover to its original state. Strength training and aerobics are alternated to allow some muscle groups to rest while others are engaged.
Rather than an overtraining injury, the result is a more complete level of fitness.
Both cardio and strength training require rest days. However, cardio and strength training hit different muscles in different ways.
Cardio rest days can include weight lifting and your strength training rest days can include swimming, biking, running, or the other cardio activities.
Compared to doing nothing on your rest days, alternating cardio and strength training will lead to better and more restful sleep.
The Wrap Up
If you keep performing the same kind of exercise every day, then there are high chances that you might hit a weight loss plateau or lose motivation to carry on exercising. However, variety is the key to keep going. Ideally, cardio and strength training should be done on alternate days. A 40 minutes session of cardio and strength training on alternative days is enough for weight loss. But if you want to combine the two exercises on the same day, then first perform weight training and then cardio for an effective outcome.
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