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Ask Shannon: Fitness and Nutrition Q & A

Posted June 24, 2008 at 04:00 PM by Shannon Clark

Section: Her Fitness, Training Programs

With years of training under her belt, resident fitness and nutrition expert Shannon Clark is ready to help you on your way to a healthy, informed lifestyle. Got a question? her your inquiries, and be sure to check back every week for the latest Q&A.

Q: I’m relatively new to this whole workout thing and am trying to figure out a schedule.  I’m not sure how to combine my cardio workouts with my weight workouts.  In the past I’ve really shied away from doing weight training and typically would just complete forty five minutes to an hour of cardio training.

Any thoughts?

A: For sure – weight lifting is absolutely critical; in fact, I’d almost go as far to say that for weight loss to happen, it’s more important than cardio activity.

Weight lifting is going to help to keep your metabolism high by promoting the maintenance and building of new muscle tissue, which is the greatest calorie burning tissue in the body.

When it comes to including it in with your workouts, you ideally want to do it before your cardio work or in a separate session altogether.

The big issue here is that weight lifting is going to be more depend on muscle glycogen stores, so if you are depleting these at all during the cardio work, you’re not going to be able to lift optimally, which will affect the results you then get.

Furthermore, weight lifting when fatigued can become dangerous, particularly if you are lifting heavier weights, making it even more important that you are not doing it when you are already tired.

You should look into a variety of weight lifting programs out there or get a personal trainer to help you out so you can find out which is going to suite your time availability the best.

Typically, full-body programs are a great option and can be performed two to three times each week, or else the other good option is a upper/lower split, which is usually done four days a week, with one day off in between each upper/lower cycle.

Just do remember that frequency will trump volume so it would be better to do a full body workout three times a week and only do one set for each exercise than doing the workout once per week but doing three to four sets per exercise.

As long as you are lifting with good intensity and really trying to push yourself, one to two sets should be enough to notice good results.

So, keep this in mind when planning how you will perform you workout program. You do want to always complete a short warm-up before you begin lifting however, so this could be ten minutes on the cardio machine, just be sure it does not go much longer than that.

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Tags: cardio, clark, muscle, time management, weight lifting, workout planning, workout programs

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