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Cardio or weights first? A kinesiologist explains how to optimize the order of your exercise routine
When you enter the gym, which way should you head first? Toward the treadmills and spin studio to get your sweat on with a cardio session? Or toward the free weights and strength-training machines to do some resistance training?
The American College of Sports Medicine suggests doing both types of exercise to take advantage of their unique benefits for improving health and daily functioning and reducing chronic disease risk. But what is the optimal sequence to get the best results?
The answer to this question is … it depends. I’m an exercise physiologist. Recently in my lab we have been studying the effects of combinations of aerobic and resistance training on improving health-related fitness, particularly aerobic capacity and muscular strength.
Research suggests that when you’re designing your exercise program, there are a few factors to take into account, including your age, fitness level and exercise history and goals. You’ll also want to consider the volume of your exercise routine – that is, its duration and intensity – and how you’ll schedule your training during the day.
Benefits of exercise
First, just about any exercise at all is going to be better for you than doing nothing.
Aerobic exercise is rhythmic activity that gets your heart pumping. Examples are walking, running, swimming, cycling and using a cardio machine such as an elliptical trainer.
Aerobic exercise can improve cardiorespiratory function – over time, your heart and lungs get better at delivering oxygen to your muscles to make energy for continued muscle contractions. Aerobic exercise can also reduce several chronic disease risk factors, increase how much energy your body uses and how much fat it burns, and improve physical and cognitive function.
Resistance training involves strengthening your muscles by lifting, pushing or pulling against resistance. This type of exercise can be done using free-weight barbells, dumbbells, kettlebells, weight machines or even elastic bands.
Resistance exercise improves muscular strength, endurance and the power and the size of muscles – what exercise physiologists call muscle hypertrophy. Studies show resistance training has health-related benefits, as well, particularly for people who have or are at risk of developing Type 2 diabetes. It can improve blood pressure, blood levels of glucose and the ability of muscles to use glucose for energy, and it helps maintain lean body mass and bone health.
Training for health benefits
With a limited amount of time to devote to working out, many people include both cardio and weights in the same exercise session. This concurrent training comes with plenty of benefits for your health, including lowering your cardiovascular and metabolic risks.
In fact, doing both forms of exercise together is better, especially for people with chronic disease risk factors, than exercising for the same amount of time but sticking with just aerobic or resistance exercise.
Studies of concurrent training suggest a generalized training effect – similar improvements in aerobic capacity and muscular strength, regardless of the order of aerobic and resistance exercises in a session. These benefits hold for a wide variety of people, including those who are initially inactive, recreationally active, young people and older women and men.
Resistance exercise done before aerobic exercise results in a small increase in lower-body muscular strength without compromising all the other improvements in health-related physical fitness.
So if your exercise goals are along the lines of staying generally healthy and enjoying the mental benefits of moving your body, resistance training first might provide a little boost. Research suggests that overall, though, you don’t need to worry too much about which order to focus on – cardio versus weights.
Training with performance goals in mind
On the other hand, you may want be more thoughtful about the order of your workout if you’re a performance-oriented athlete who is training to get better at a particular sport or prepare for a competition.
Research suggests that for these exercisers, concurrent training may slightly inhibit improvement in aerobic capacity. More likely, it can hinder gains in muscular strength and power development, and to a lesser degree muscle growth. This phenomenon is called the “interference effect.” It shows up most in well-trained athletes undertaking high volumes of both aerobic and resistance exercise.
Researchers are still investigating what happens on a cellular level to cause the interference effect. Aerobic and resistance training unleash competing influences at the molecular level that affect genetic signaling and protein synthesis. At the start of an exercise program, the body’s adaptations are more generalized. But with more training, the muscle changes become more and more specific to the kind of work being done, and the likelihood of the interference effect kicking in increases.
Of course, many sports require combinations of aerobic and muscular capabilities. Some elite-level athletes need to improve both. So the question remains: What is the optimal order of the two modes of exercise to get the best performance effects?
Given research findings about concurrent training for high-level athletes, it makes sense to do resistance exercise first or to train first in the type of exercise that is most important to your performance goals. Additionally, if possible, elite athletes should give their bodies a break of at least three hours between resistance and aerobic training sessions.
Don’t sweat the order
In my lab, we’re studying what we call “microcycles” of aerobic and resistance exercise. Instead of needing to decide which to do first, you weave the two modalities together in much shorter bursts. For instance, one set of a resistance exercise is immediately followed by three minutes of walking or running; you repeat this cycle for as many times as necessary to include all of the resistance exercises in your routine.
Our preliminary findings suggest this method of concurrent training results in similar gains in aerobic fitness, muscular strength and lean muscle mass – while also feeling less challenging – when compared with the typical concurrent routine where all of the resistance exercise is followed by all of the aerobic exercise.
For most people, my current advice remains to choose the order of exercise based on your personal preferences and what will keep you coming back to the gym. High-level athletes can avoid any significant interference effect by doing their resistance routine before the aerobic routine or by separating their aerobic and resistance workouts within a particular day.
Randal Claytor, Associate Professor of Kinesiology, Nutrition and Health, Miami University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
CLEARLAKE, Calif. — Clearlake Animal Control has dozens of dogs that continue to wait for their new homes.
The Clearlake Animal Control website lists 33 adoptable dogs.
The adoptable dogs include “Bugsy,” a 1-year-old male pit bull terrier mix with a black coat. He has been neutered.
Also available is “Lionel,” a male German shepherd mix with a tricolor coat.
The shelter is located at 6820 Old Highway 53. It’s open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.
For more information, call the shelter at 707-762-6227, email
This week’s adoptable dogs are featured below.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
On Jan. 1, 2024, the Corporate Transparency Act, or CTA, is becoming effective US law.
The CTA requires many domestic businesses and foreign businesses doing business in the US to report Beneficial Owner Information, or BOI, to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or “FinCen,” regarding the company itself and its beneficial owners, i.e., the individuals who ultimately own or control the company.
FinCen collects the BOI to combat various criminal activities, including money laundering and terrorism, that involve businesses, by sharing the BOI information with law enforcement authorities.
Explaining the CTA involves five major areas: (1) Reporting companies; (2) beneficial owners whose information is provided; (3) boi information provided; (4) how to report; and (5) when to report.
“A reporting company is (1) any corporation, limited liability company, or other similar entity that was created in the United States by the filing of a document with a secretary of state or similar office (in which case it is a domestic reporting company), or any legal entity that has been registered to do business [in the United States].”
There are important exceptions for numerous types of businesses. The point of the CTA is to get information about smaller businesses that are not otherwise reporting information about themselves. Thus, small LLC’s and corporations are required to report.
Beneficial owners include: (1) “any individual who, directly or indirectly, either exercises substantial control over a reporting company or owns or controls at least 25% of the ownership interests of a reporting company; and (2) “an individual who exercises substantial control over a reporting company if the individual meets any of four general criteria: the individual is a senior officer; the individual has authority to appoint or remove certain officers or a majority of directors of the reporting company; the individual is an important decision-maker; or the individual has any other form of substantial control over the reporting company.”
A trustee and other persons involved with a trust can be beneficial owners of an LLC or corporation if the trust owns or controls at least 25% of the ownership interest in the reporting company.
That is, the trustee, some beneficiaries and the settlor of the trust may all be beneficial owners who must report information to FinCen.
Each BOI report must include information about the reporting company and its beneficial owners. “The beneficial owners must report to FinCEN their name, date of birth, address, and unique identifier number from a recognized issuing jurisdiction and a photo of that document.
If an individual decides to file their information to FinCEN directly, they may be issued a “FinCEN identifier” which can be provided on a BOI report instead of the required information.”
The use of a FinCen identifier number by business owners is a big step towards streamlining the process by making the owners responsible for directly reporting their information to FinCen.
A reporting company is expected to report the BOI information to FinCen by means of a secure portal on FinCen’s website. The portal will begin accepting BOI reports on Jan. 1, 2024.
Existing businesses have one year to file their first BOI report. Businesses that are established between Jan. 1, 2024, and Jan. 1, 2025, have ninety (90) days to file their report (measured from the date they were incorporated or allowed to do business); and business established, or allowed to do business in the US after Jan. 1, 2025, have thirty (30) days to file their BOI report.
BOI reports must be updated as necessary. However, if a business owner has a FinCEN number then the burden is directly on the owner to update his or her information.
For further information and assistance visit FinCen’s website, www.fincen.gov/boi.
The foregoing brief discussion is not legal advice. Consult a qualified attorney or accountant for guidance.
Dennis A. Fordham, attorney, is a State Bar-Certified Specialist in estate planning, probate and trust law. His office is at 870 S. Main St., Lakeport, Calif. He can be reached at
To celebrate the holiday season, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured the galaxy known as UGC 8091, which resembles a sparkling festive snow globe.
With a dazzling array of wavelengths of light captured by filters on Hubble's premier scientific instruments, the millions of stars in this galaxy are being explored in more depth than ever before.
UGC 8091, also known as GR 8, lies around seven million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. Unlike other galaxies whose stars take a more orderly appearance, UGC 8091 is classed by astronomers as an irregular galaxy.
It's not hard to see why — the stars that make up this celestial gathering look more like a brightly shining tangle of string lights than a galaxy.
Some irregular galaxies are thought to have become tangled by tumultuous internal activity, while others are known to have formed by interactions with neighboring galaxies.
The result is a class of galaxies with a diverse array of sizes and shapes, including the diffuse scatter of stars that is this galaxy.
In particular, UGC 8091 is a dwarf irregular galaxy, meaning that it only contains around one billion stars. That's a huge number of lights, but not for a galaxy: our own Milky Way galaxy is thought to encompass over 100 billion stars, and other galaxies can have trillions!
Dwarf galaxies often orbit larger galaxies, and their low masses leave them vulnerable to being disturbed and consumed by their bigger neighbors, a process which produces twisted-up dwarf irregulars like UGC 8091.
This type of galaxy is thought to have similar characteristics to the enormously old and distant galaxies seen by astronomers in deep-field images.
It’s hoped that investigating the composition of dwarf galaxies and their stars, particularly their low metallicity, will help to uncover the evolutionary links between these ancient galaxies and more modern galaxies like our own.
To do this, astronomers have been carefully examining the many-coloured stars of UGC 8091. Different features of the galaxy can be picked out by using filters to restrict the light entering Hubble's instruments to very specific wavelength ranges. Those filtered images can then be recombined to make a full-color image — an astonishing twelve filters combine to produce this image, with light from the mid-ultraviolet right through to the red end of the visible spectrum contributing.
The blossoming patches of red represent light emitted by excited hydrogen molecules in hot, energetic stars that have formed in recent starbursts. The other sparkles on show in this image are a mix of older stars.
The data used in this image date from 2006 to 2021, and were taken by two of Hubble’s most advanced instruments: the Wide Field Camera 3 and the Advanced Camera for Surveys.
Among other things, the observing programmes sought to investigate the role of low-mass galaxies, like UGC 8091, in reionizing the early Universe, and to examine the results of star formation in low-metallicity galaxies.
Despite how small and misshapen they look, dwarf irregular galaxies turn out to hold a great deal of information about our Universe — no less than any of the other celestial lights in our sky.
At its Dec. 5 meeting, the council unanimously accepted staff’s proposal to award a $128,538.59 contract to Skiles & Associates for the Carnegie Library Improvements Project.
The project is for interior renovations to the upstairs of the Classical Revival style building, which first opened its doors on Feb. 18, 1918, and served as the city’s library until 1985.
Those repairs will include wall repair and painting, insulating and installing a new ceiling, replacing damaged floorboards, new floor finishing, new recessed lights, battery powered emergency lights, and installation of a new chandelier and ceiling fan.
The city engineer’s estimate for the project was $113,895,
Public Works Director Ron Ladd said the city put the project out to bid for six weeks and received two bids.
The low bid was from Skiles for $128,538.59, while Next Generation Builders submitted a bid totaling $143,600.
Previous improvements included work on the first floor, such as the new elevator.
The work is expected to start in February, with completion set for June.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
The United States Department of Agriculture Food and Nutrition Service has started receiving official notices from states and tribal nations that intend to operate the new, permanent summer nutrition assistance program for children, known as Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer — one of many strategies the department is leveraging to tackle child hunger when schools are closed.
California, Cherokee Nation, Chickasaw Nation, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New Jersey, Ohio, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia are among the first to confirm their plans to implement Summer EBT in 2024, the program’s inaugural year, and many more are expected to follow:
Through Summer EBT, states, territories, and certain tribal nations can provide grocery benefits to families with eligible school-aged children during the summer months.
Once implemented nationwide, Summer EBT is expected to benefit more than 29 million children, reducing food insecurity and helping kids get the nutrition they need to grow, learn, and thrive.
“Summer EBT provides an unprecedented opportunity to reduce child hunger during the summer months,” said Cindy Long, administrator of the USDA Food and Nutrition Service. “FNS is thrilled to see trailblazing states and tribes step up and make early commitments to expanding summer nutrition benefits for children in their communities. We look forward to working with all states and eligible tribal nations on this important effort — helping ensure children across our nation get the nutrition they need year-round.”
Millions of children participate in USDA’s school breakfast and lunch programs during the school year. However, when schools are closed, kids lose access to these healthy meals and are at higher risk of food and nutrition insecurity.
Reflecting a bipartisan effort to close the summer hunger gap, Congress passed legislation in late 2022 making Summer EBT the first new federal nutrition program in decades.
Summer EBT will support families with $40 each summer month per eligible child to buy food at grocery stores, farmers markets, or other authorized retailers, similar to how SNAP benefits are used.
USDA tested Summer EBT as a demonstration project in select states and tribal nations over multiple years.
Rigorous evaluations showed that providing these benefits decreased the number of kids with very low food security by about one-third and supported healthier diets.
This new program will work hand-in-hand with other USDA nutrition programs to connect every eligible child with nutritious food during the summer.
In addition to Summer EBT, USDA summer nutrition programs include group meal service at central locations, such as schools, camps, and community centers, as well as the option to provide grab-n-go or home-delivered meals in many rural communities.
Summer EBT is an additional benefit and does not replace these summer meal programs. Families are encouraged to participate in all summer nutrition programs available to them.
USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service works to end hunger and improve food and nutrition security through a suite of 16 nutrition assistance programs, such as the school breakfast and lunch programs, WIC and SNAP.
Together, these programs serve one in four Americans over the course of a year, promoting consistent and equitable access to healthy, safe, and affordable food essential to optimal health and well-being.