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After years of living with overweight I've been on a crusade against fat for a couple of month now with great success. I'm combining a low carb diet with the following training regime:

  • Mo, Tue, Wed - One hour of cardio on my recumbent trainer between 8-9pm in the evening
  • Thu - one day off
  • Fri, Sat, Sun - One hour of cardio on my recumbent trainer between 8-9pm in the evening
  • Wed, Fri, Sun - One hour in the gym primarily working on doing a mix of exercises for gaining strength between 4pm-6pm in the afternoon

Now my question is. Could the cardio sessions on the same days that I'm doing the gym could negatively interfere with them or should I swap them perhaps? I'm just asking out of curiosity.

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  • Did you burn out like everyone was expecting you to?
    – Noumenon
    Jan 30, 2015 at 10:07

3 Answers 3

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The general advice for weight training is to rest your muscles at least 48 hours before working them again. With a beginning strength training program like Starting Strength or StrongLifts 5x5, you work out no more than three days per week.

Now, doing cardio on the same days that you are lifting is perfectly fine. However, you can overdo it. Your muscles need to rest to rebuild and get stronger. If you overwork them, it takes longer to rebuild. In the beginning you won't notice much of a difference because you are still building up the foundational strength. The place where you'll see the effects of over training the cardio will be when you start stalling sooner and hitting plateaus for longer periods of time.

I lift three days a week with one day off in between. After lifting I run for about 20 minutes of intervals (1 min run, 1 min jog). I'll also go through my katas in Martial Arts. The other days I don't go to the gym at all. Every day I keep track of what I eat so that I don't regain what I worked so hard to get rid of.

Bottom line: exercise is important, but you get rid of fat quickest and most thoroughly by making adjustments to your diet.

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One ingredient that is key to any schedule is the long term viability. Based on the little bit of info presented, my concern would be burnout! As Christopher points out 2hrs. of weight training is high. Back in the day Arnold was quoted as saying anything longer than 1.5 hrs was too much...and we all know the kinds of drugs he was on! My suggestion is come up with a workout schedule for 6 weeks and know that in 6 weeks you are going to change it.

Getting fit and staying fit is not a sprint...think marathon!

I am currently a competitive cyclist and have played sports my whole life. I currently do 5/6 days a week on the bike for approx 12 hours of cardio and go to the gym at least 2 days a week for about 45 minutes each visit. I do core and ab work 4-5 times a week usually before cycling.

There have been times when I was doing the opposite - 6 days of weight training and only cycling 1-3x weekly. IMO, try not to be overly rigid with yourself as that tends to lead to burnout! I am not suggesting no structure. My experience is the folks that find a middle ground tend to experience real results and dramatic change in life experience.

Best of luck!

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I've not read anything to indicate moderate cardio exercises interfering with resistance training.

However, two hours of resistance training is very high and probably should have rest two rest days in between. Or, you could do a split workout an spend 30-45 minutes doing resistance training on Mon/Tues and Thurs/Fri. My own experience with such a split is that it gives me the best gains for time spent in the gym.

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