Options and an opinion

Assuming that folks don’t want to try anything actually dangerous, I’m completely in favor of experimenting with workouts.  There’s a lot of wiggle room for how to get our workouts done once basic safety is dealt with.  However, I do have preferences and reasons for them.

 

I do workouts in this order:  cardio, weights, flexibility/mindfulness.

 

Here’s the reasoning.  When we begin a workout, we need to warm up.  Cardio is the perfect way to do that.  So we start with some slow jogging before a run, a couple of easy laps before a more intense swim, and the like.  We finish our cardio workout all warmed up for our weight workout!  Hooray!  We lift, lift, lift with those nice warm muscles.  Then, when we’re good and tired, we approach the flexibility and mindfulness stuff.  Now a whole bunch of people want to stretch first, before cardio, before everything.  This is not how I do it for two reasons.  One is that our muscles stretch better after they are warmed up.  Doing flexibility at the end ensures that we don’t pull a hammie stretching that hammie.  The other is a little more academic:  science suggests that stretching before lifting weights has a slight negative effect on how much weight we can lift.  For most of us who are not competing in weight lifting events, this is probably not all that important, but I know that we all feel better when we lift better, so we might as well save the flexibility for the end.

 

All that said, it is always worth trying things another way.  If we really need to prioritize our weights, we can do a brief warm-up and get the weights done first.  If we don’t need to do cardio on a particular day, we can head straight to yoga (any competent teacher will ensure that there is a warm-up built into the class).  Maybe we need to center our minds before we can even consider facing the elliptical machine.  We can try all the options.