Did you ever question in what order you should do your workout? Today I’m going to share some ideas that may help you be more successful with your workout routines.
In general, you want to do your hardest, full body movements before you do the smaller muscle focused exercises.
- Should you do cardio or strength first? It depends on your goals. If your goal is to gain more strength, I’d suggest you start with a 5-10 minute cardio warm up and move on to your strength work. If you have additional time, add your cardio after that. If your goal is cardio endurance, (I.E. if you’re training for a race) then you would probably want to start with your cardio training, or do strength on different days when you are doing lighter cardio days.
- Do multi-joint exercises before single-joint exercises. Multi-joint exercises (also referred to as compound exercises) are exercises like squats, push-ups, deadlifts and push presses because you are working several muscles at one time vs. a bicep curl with a dumbbell that only works one muscle at a time. I try to do my multi-joint exercises first, and then do the exercises that only work one muscle at a time afterwards. This should also have you working your largest muscles first such as the glutes, back and chest.
- Do plyometric exercises first. If you are going to do these explosive exercises (all out effort like box jumps, squat jumps, or burpees) you will want to do them right after your warm up. I don’t recommend doing them more than once or twice per week. They will add strength and endurance
- Switch it up. Your body will quickly adjust to what you routinely do, and you will stop seeing improvements unless you do things different. For example, if you always do push ups before pull ups, you will probably see more strength growth in your chest than your back. Try alternating the order and kinds of exercises you do to see strength gains.
- Save abs for the end. If you’ve done push-ups earlier in your workout, you’ve already done some ab work, but I do my focused ab work at the end.
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