Weights or Cardio?

     So my friend won a free month of personal training at our local gym!  She has done personal training before but at a different gym and with a different trainer, so we were very excited to see what this guy had to say!  I caught up with her today and asked her how it went.  From what she said, the trainer seemed to cause more questions than give answers.

     One of the things he said that really confused us was that weight training is more important than cardio if you want to tone and lose weight.  In fact he said you should focus on weight training, healthy diet and then cardio, in that order from most important to least. 

     Both she and I agreed that that weight training and cardio go hand in hand together when it comes to toning, one wasn’t more important than the other.  Muscles do burn more calories even at rest, so you do want to build those up, but doing cardio, especially at the fat burning heart rate, helps get rid of the fat so you can see the toned muscle!  Really this guy didn’t make any sense.  So after I did my Zumba class, I got home and started to google…

 

Right away I found proof that she and I were right, cardio and weight training are both important!  LifeScript was the first link and even yahoo answers agreed with me.  I mean, I’ve read this in so many places it probably doesn’t even need to be cited.  But I wanted to find some sort of reasoning behind the logic of this trainer, or was he actually full of it? Well I found an interesting article from Women’s Health Magazine Online that kind of went with the trainer’s “weights, diet, cardio” order logic.  In this article it answers, what should you do first, weights or cardio.  I thought I knew the answer, you do cardio, weights and then cool down with cardio, but this article gives a totally different answer!  The article mentions that you should do strength training first and then cardio.  Why? 

Well according to the article it’s because when you do weights firsts you use up all your anaerobic energy, so by the time you do your cardio you are burning your fat stores, which is what people want!  People do cardio to burn fat so this logic totally makes senses.  And as an added plus your burn more calories ever after your work out!

So now I’m going to try this before my Zumba class to see if it helps me lose any of this annoying fat that is stuck on me!

Hope it helps you guys too!