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Originally Posted by Ecto-I
I would contend that doing cardio immediately after your weight training session would inhibit your muscular gains since your body is in a catabolic state. There's a lot of science that goes back and forth. Some say cardio immediately after lifting is great because your glycogen stores are depleted. However, the detriment is that your body is using muscle stores for fuel as well.
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I've been doing cardio after weight training since I started lifting seriously a decade ago. Hasn't hurt my gains one bit. Weight training tells your body "Hey, you need to hang on to this, because it's needed." Weight training before cardio actually prevents your body from wanting to use muscle for energy. So, once you start depleting the glycogen stores, it won't look to muscle to fuel itself (because it already assumes that it needs to maintain the muscle), and then dips into fat stores.
The fears of muscle cannibalization due to cardio are vastly overrated. Cardio after weight training also has benefits like increasing the blood flow all over the body, helping the muscles repair.
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However, I don't necessarily agree that doing cardio after resistance training is MORE effective than otherwise...
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Look at it this way: It's going to take you about 30 minutes just to burn off excess energy as it is (excess meaning NOT fat). You can either do that with cardio or lifting. If you ignore the lifting, you WILL lose muscle mass, because the body isn't getting the signals that it needs to keep it. So, you can do cardio for 30 minutes that isn't going to actually burn fat, just so you can GET to the part where you burn fat... or, you can use that energy for something useful, like resistance training. Then, when you get to the end of the resistance training, your body wants to hold on to muscle, yet needs energy. Where's it going to look? Fat stores. And then you do some intense cardio and it doesn't have to be an extended session to burn a lot of fat.