When it comes to exercise, there's a huge push to do cardio. It burns calories, reduces stress, helps you lose or maintain your weight, helps relieve muscle soreness, and is good for your lungs and your heart. While that's true, cardio isn't the only thing your body needs. It's also important to strength train to tone your muscles, increase your metabolism, and increase your muscle mass. Of course you also need to stretch as well to increase flexibility, which will prevent injury.
So a good rule of thumb is to include all three — cardio, strength training, and stretching — in every workout. You can start with 30 minutes of jogging, followed by 20 minutes of dumbbells exercises, and finish with 20 minutes of yoga. Not only will your entire body feel worked, but doing all three every time you exercise will make sure you don't neglect one type of training.
Marni
CNC Costume National
Emily And Fin
I always combine all 3. I do half an hour cardio, then like 20-25 minutes weights and then finish with some stretching until I feel good.
1All 3 are key.
2Ok but what if I don't have 70 minutes to work out?
3i do cardio on mondays, wednesdays and thursdays (stretching before and after) and strength training on tuesdays, fridays and sundays (stretching also). that's ok too, right?
4I don't usually do all three at once, but I do try to do cardio and strength and flexibility throughout the day. I break it up...I'll do my strength after work and cardio before work. I wish I could do all of them at once, but sometimes I don't have the time to fit it all in one workout.
5I do this every workout and love it! I usually stretch, cardio (20), Strength Train, Cardio (20) and Stretch.
6Cardio is overrated in my opinion. The media insists that women focus more on cardio and supplement with strength training. I did this for years without the results I wanted. I was thin but never had the muscle I wanted. I cut down to only 2-3 days of cardio doing HIIT for 20 min and focus on lifting heavy weights for 45min-1hr 4x a week and saw major results in the first week. I'm so happy I don't have to be a slave to cardio anymore!
7I used to do cardio some days, strength training others, with a little cardio on strength days when I could fit it in. So I was working out 6 days a week and not really getting 6 days a week results.
Now I've switched up my routine, I do 15-20 mins of abs to start, 20 minutes of running, then I target two parts of my body (chest/bicep; tricep/shoulder; legs/back) with weights. I stretch as I go so the entire workout rarely lasts more than an hour. I've seen more results from this in a few weeks than I did in months of my first routine.
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