****Official Weight Loss and Exercise Thread****

[Ecto-I]

Originally Posted by Silock

Still, those 45 minutes are much more effective when preceded by a depletion of muscle glycogen stores. You can shorten the time and increase the effectiveness. Win-win, IMO. Plus, if your rest intervals are sufficiently short, it's ridiculously difficult keep up 90% of your max HR for 25 minutes, let alone a full 45. After about 25 minutes, the max HR starts dropping. Obviously, this won't happen if you're sprinting for 30 seconds and resting for 2 minutes, but if you're doing something like a 1 minute on, 1 minute off, or 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off... 45 minutes would just about kill you.

I mean, I still do interval training on my non-resistance training days, but it's not as effective as it is on the days when I also resistance train. Just cardio alone, even HIIT, can give you food cravings. Hard to resist those.

But really, the reality is that exercise has a largely negligible effect on weight loss. It's all about diet.

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.

I try to do cardio on a relatively empty stomach at a different time of day than my weight training. Obviously not everyone has time for this in which case I too would do it immediately following my resistance work. However, I don't necessarily agree that doing cardio after resistance training is MORE effective than otherwise...