Cardio Before or After Weights? What the Order Research Shows

Cardio before or after weights is one of the few gym-order questions with a clean, replicated answer. Lift first. Three independent meta-analyses, published across six years and drawing on different pools of trials, all land on the same asymmetry: doing resistance work first protects a small amount of lower-body strength adaptation, and doing it second protects nothing measurable. One order has a cost. The other does not. So you take the free option.

What makes this worth 2,000 words rather than two sentences is how small the effect is, and how much bigger a different variable turns out to be. The order effect only exists inside a single session. Once you put a few hours between the two modes, it largely disappears, and so does most of the wider interference penalty. If you have been agonising over whether the treadmill goes before or after the squat rack, the more useful question is whether they need to be in the same hour at all.

This page is about sequence. If you want the underlying mechanism, how endurance and resistance signalling compete at the molecular level and whether concurrent training hurts at all, that lives on our concurrent training and the interference effect review. If your question is really about running specifically eating your muscle, that is our does cardio kill your gains page. This one answers the ordering question and nothing else.

What does the research say about doing cardio before or after weights?

Eddens 2018: the meta-analysis built for this exact question

Most concurrent-training research compares lifting plus cardio against lifting alone. That answers "does cardio cost me gains" and says nothing about order. Eddens, van Someren and Howatson (2018) in Sports Medicine is the review built specifically for the ordering question. It screened for trials that ran both orders, resistance-then-endurance versus endurance-then-resistance, inside the same session, for at least five weeks, in healthy adults. Ten studies and 20 training groups qualified.

The results split cleanly. Lower-body dynamic strength, meaning your squat, leg press or knee extension one-rep max, improved 6.91% more in the resistance-first groups (95% CI 1.96 to 11.87, p = 0.006, n = 227). Everything else was a null. Lower-body static strength came in at -0.04% (p = 0.98, n = 155). Hypertrophy was 1.15% (p = 0.40, n = 137). VO2max was -0.27% (p = 0.83, n = 184). Body fat percentage was 0.68% (p = 0.42, n = 167). The authors' conclusion is narrow and worth quoting the shape of: a resistance-then-endurance order benefits lower-body dynamic strength, particularly for people who cannot separate their sessions.

Read the nulls as carefully as the finding. Muscle growth did not care about order. Aerobic capacity did not care about order. Fat loss did not care about order. The single thing the order moved was dynamic lower-body strength, which is exactly the quality most sensitive to how fresh your legs and nervous system are when you start.

Murlasits 2018: the same answer from a different study pool

Murlasits, Kneffel and Thalib (2018) in the Journal of Sports Sciences asked the same question with different inclusion criteria and different statistics, including an inverse-variance heterogeneity model to adjust for bias between studies. They looked at chronic effects on two outcomes only: lower-body 1RM and maximal aerobic capacity.

Lower-body 1RM was significantly higher when strength training preceded endurance, with a pooled mean change of 3.96 kg (95% CI 0.81 to 7.10 kg). Aerobic capacity showed no order effect at all: 0.39 ml/kg/min (95% CI -1.03 to 1.81). Their conclusion mirrors Eddens almost word for word. Sequencing strength before endurance benefits lower-body strength adaptation, and aerobic improvement is not affected by training order.

Two reviews, published within months of each other, using different methods and overlapping but not identical trial pools, agreeing on both the direction and the rough size of the effect. That is about as good as exercise science replication gets.

Gao and Yu 2023: the largest and most recent pooling

The most recent word belongs to Gao and Yu (2023) in Frontiers in Physiology, who pooled 19 randomized controlled trials and 482 participants (285 men, 197 women) split across strength-endurance and endurance-strength groups. Lower-limb strength favoured the strength-first order with a standardised mean difference of 0.19 (95% CI 0.02 to 0.37, p = 0.032). VO2max showed nothing: SMD 0.02 (95% CI -0.21 to 0.25, p = 0.859).

Their subgroup analysis is the practically useful part. The strength-first advantage was most pronounced in older adults, in women, in programmes running longer than eight weeks, and at a training frequency of twice a week. Knee flexion (p = 0.040) and knee extension (p = 0.026) both favoured strength-first. Lower-limb power showed no order effect (p = 0.523). So the people with the most to gain from getting the order right are the ones training a couple of times a week over a long block, which describes most people reading this.

Schumann 2022: separation beats sequence

The single most useful finding in this literature is not about order at all. Schumann, Feuerbacher, Suenkeler, Freitag, Ronnestad, Doma and Lundberg (2022) in Sports Medicine pooled 43 studies comparing concurrent training against identical resistance training with no aerobic work. Across the whole pool, maximal strength showed no significant loss (SMD -0.06, 95% CI -0.20 to 0.09, p = 0.446) and neither did hypertrophy (SMD -0.01, p = 0.919). Only explosive strength was blunted (SMD -0.28, 95% CI -0.48 to -0.08, p = 0.007).

Then the moderator analysis. That explosive-strength attenuation was significant when the two modes were performed within the same session (p = 0.043) and not significant when the sessions were separated by at least three hours. Type of cardio (cycling versus running), weekly frequency, training status and age all failed to moderate the result. Session separation did.

So the hierarchy is: separating the two modes by a few hours does more for you than getting the within-session order right. Order is the tiebreaker you use when separation is not on the table.

Robineau 2016: how big the gap needs to be

The trial that actually manipulated the gap is Robineau, Babault, Piscione, Lacome and Bigard (2016) in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. Fifty-eight amateur rugby players were assigned to a control group, a strength-only group, or one of three concurrent groups with 0, 6 or 24 hours between the strength and aerobic sequences. Strength always came first. The programme ran seven weeks with two sessions of each quality per week.

Bench press and half squat gains were lowest in the zero-hour group compared with the six-hour, 24-hour and strength-only groups. Isokinetic knee extension at 60 degrees per second was likely higher for the 24-hour group than the zero-hour group. VO2peak rose in all three concurrent groups, but the increase was larger in the 24-hour group than in either the zero-hour or six-hour groups. The authors' recommendation was blunt: avoid scheduling two contradictory qualities less than six hours apart if you want full adaptive responses from both.

Note what that means for the aerobic side. Cramming the cardio straight after the lifting did not just cost strength. It cost aerobic adaptation too, because the cardio was performed on legs that had just been fatigued. Nobody wins in a zero-gap pairing.

Which order should you use for your goal?

The research answer is "lift first" because most people asking are lifting for strength or muscle and adding cardio for health. If your priorities are different, the rule flips. The principle underneath all of it is simple: whichever quality you care about most goes first, while you are fresh.

Why does the order have any effect at all?

Two mechanisms, and only one of them is exotic.

The boring one is residual fatigue. A hard endurance bout leaves you with depleted glycogen in the working muscles, reduced motor unit recruitment and, if it was long enough, some muscle damage. Load a heavy squat on top of that and you complete fewer quality reps at a given weight. Do that twice a week for twelve weeks and the accumulated training stimulus is genuinely smaller. That is most of the 6.91%.

The interesting one runs in the other direction, and it is why order is not a one-way street. Doma, Deakin and Bentley (2017) in Sports Medicine reviewed the mirror-image problem: a single bout of resistance training induces residual fatigue that can impair a subsequent endurance session for hours or days. Their proposed mechanisms are impaired neural recruitment, reduced movement efficiency and altered running kinematics that raise energy cost, increased muscle soreness, and reduced muscle glycogen. If that endurance quality is consistently compromised session after session, optimal endurance development may be limited.

So lifting first is not free in an absolute sense. It is free in the pooled data because the aerobic outcomes those meta-analyses measured, mostly VO2max, are more robust to a slightly degraded session than a 1RM is. If you are a runner whose key workout is a threshold session, Doma's review is your warning that squatting beforehand will make it worse, even if your VO2max eventually catches up.

Both mechanisms point the same direction: the more fatigue you carry into a quality, the less that quality adapts. Order is just the crudest lever for controlling which quality inherits the fatigue.

Does it help to train the two modes at different times of day?

Splitting them across the day is the most practical way to get the three-hour separation that Schumann (2022) identified. Cardio in the morning, lifting in the evening, or the reverse. The question is whether the time of day itself changes anything.

Kuusmaa, Schumann, Sedliak, Kraemer, Newton, Malinen, Nyman, Hakkinen and Hakkinen (2016) in Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism ran the longest trial in this area: 24 weeks, 42 young men, split into four groups by both order (endurance-then-strength or strength-then-endurance) and time of day (morning or evening). Leg press 1RM rose similarly across all four groups, 14 to 19% when tested in the morning and 18 to 24% when tested in the evening. Vastus lateralis cross-sectional area rose 12 to 20% in every group. From weeks 13 to 24 the evening groups gained more muscle mass than the morning groups. Time to exhaustion on a cycle ergometer improved 16 to 28%, with a main effect favouring the endurance-first order at both testing times.

Two takeaways. First, the endurance-first order did protect endurance performance in the longest trial available, which is the symmetry the shorter meta-analyses could not resolve. Second, training order and time of day only separated the groups after twelve weeks. Below that horizon, neither mattered enough to detect. Which is a reasonable summary of this entire topic: over a few weeks, order is noise; over a few months, it is worth a small amount.

Common misconceptions

"Doing cardio first burns your glycogen so you cannot lift."

Directionally right, wildly overstated. Glycogen depletion is one of four mechanisms Doma (2017) lists, alongside neural, kinematic and soreness effects, and a typical 30-minute moderate cardio bout does not empty a trained person's muscle glycogen. The measured consequence across ten trials was 6.91% less strength gain over a block, not an inability to train. Eat carbohydrate around your sessions and this shrinks further.

"Lifting first ruins your cardio session."

It does not ruin it, but it is not nothing either. The meta-analyses found no order effect on VO2max, and Doma (2017) documents that resistance-induced fatigue really does degrade subsequent endurance performance. The reconciliation is that VO2max is a blunt outcome. If your endurance goal is a number on a treadmill test, order will not change it. If your endurance goal is hitting threshold paces in a key workout, do that workout first or on another day.

"Doing cardio after lifting burns more fat."

The claim comes from the idea that lifting depletes glycogen so the following cardio oxidises more fat. Substrate use during one session does not determine fat loss. Eddens (2018) measured body fat percentage directly across 167 participants in both orders and found a 0.68% difference (p = 0.42), a null. Our fasted cardio research review covers the same fallacy in its more common form.

"The interference effect means I have to pick one."

No. Schumann (2022) pooled 43 studies and found no significant loss in maximal strength or hypertrophy from concurrent training at all, with only explosive strength modestly affected. The whole argument on this page is about optimising a few percent at the margin. If you are choosing between doing both suboptimally and doing one perfectly, do both.

What the research suggests going forward

The practical version fits in five lines. If both modes share a session and you care about strength, lift first, because that order is worth roughly 7% of your lower-body strength gain and costs your aerobic gain nothing. If you care most about endurance performance, run or ride first. If you can put three or more hours between them, do that instead and stop worrying about order, because separation is the bigger lever. If you can put them on different days, better still. And if the only version you will actually do is thirty minutes of lifting followed immediately by twenty minutes on the bike, do that, because the cost is a few percent and the cost of skipping is everything.

Where the literature is still thin: almost all of these trials measure lower-body strength, so the upper-body order question is basically unstudied. Most participants are young or middle-aged, though Gao and Yu (2023) found the strength-first advantage was larger in older adults, which suggests the effect grows as recovery capacity falls. And nobody has run a well-powered trial on the order question in people training only two or three times a week, which is most of the population. The HIIT versus steady-state comparison and our zone 2 training research review both matter here too, since a low-intensity zone 2 ride creates far less residual fatigue than an interval session and makes the order question much less important.

For the reader who just wants the rule: weights, then cardio, unless you are training for a race. Everything else on this page is the margin around that sentence. If you want an app that will lay both out for you rather than leaving you to sequence it, our roundup of the best strength training apps covers what to look for.

References

1. Eddens L, van Someren K, Howatson G. "The Role of Intra-Session Exercise Sequence in the Interference Effect: A Systematic Review with Meta-Analysis." Sports Medicine 48.1 (2018): 177-188. doi:10.1007/s40279-017-0784-1.
2. Murlasits Z, Kneffel Z, Thalib L. "The physiological effects of concurrent strength and endurance training sequence: A systematic review and meta-analysis." Journal of Sports Sciences 36.11 (2018): 1212-1219. doi:10.1080/02640414.2017.1364405.
3. Gao J, Yu L. "Effects of concurrent training sequence on VO2max and lower limb strength performance: A systematic review and meta-analysis." Frontiers in Physiology 14 (2023): 1072679. doi:10.3389/fphys.2023.1072679.
4. Schumann M, Feuerbacher JF, Sunkeler M, Freitag N, Ronnestad BR, Doma K, Lundberg TR. "Compatibility of Concurrent Aerobic and Strength Training for Skeletal Muscle Size and Function: An Updated Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis." Sports Medicine 52.3 (2022): 601-612. doi:10.1007/s40279-021-01587-7.
5. Robineau J, Babault N, Piscione J, Lacome M, Bigard AX. "Specific Training Effects of Concurrent Aerobic and Strength Exercises Depend on Recovery Duration." Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research 30.3 (2016): 672-683. doi:10.1519/JSC.0000000000000798.
6. Doma K, Deakin GB, Bentley DJ. "Implications of Impaired Endurance Performance following Single Bouts of Resistance Training: An Alternate Concurrent Training Perspective." Sports Medicine 47.11 (2017): 2187-2200. doi:10.1007/s40279-017-0758-3.
7. Kuusmaa M, Schumann M, Sedliak M, Kraemer WJ, Newton RU, Malinen JP, Nyman K, Hakkinen A, Hakkinen K. "Effects of morning versus evening combined strength and endurance training on physical performance, muscle hypertrophy, and serum hormone concentrations." Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism 41.12 (2016): 1285-1294. doi:10.1139/apnm-2016-0271.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should I do cardio before or after weights?

If both land in the same session and strength or muscle is the goal, lift first. Eddens et al. (2018) pooled 10 training studies in Sports Medicine and found resistance-first sessions produced 6.91% greater lower-body dynamic strength gains than endurance-first sessions (95% CI 1.96 to 11.87, p = 0.006). Murlasits et al. (2018) reached the same conclusion independently, with lower-body 1RM 3.96 kg higher when strength came first. Both reviews found aerobic capacity was unaffected by order, so lifting first costs your cardio nothing. If endurance performance is the actual goal, do the cardio first instead.

How much strength do I lose by doing cardio first?

Roughly 7% of your lower-body strength gain over a training block, not 7% of your strength. Eddens et al. (2018) reported a 6.91% difference in lower-body dynamic strength improvement favouring the resistance-first order across 227 participants. Murlasits et al. (2018) put the same gap at 3.96 kg of leg 1RM (95% CI 0.81 to 7.10). Gao and Yu (2023) pooled 19 randomized trials and found a small but statistically significant advantage for strength-first (SMD 0.19, 95% CI 0.02 to 0.37, p = 0.032). It is a real cost and a modest one. Nobody stops progressing because they ran before they squatted.

Does doing weights first hurt my cardio results?

Not measurably, in the pooled data. Eddens et al. (2018) found an order effect on VO2max of -0.27% (95% CI -2.74 to 2.20, p = 0.83), which is nothing. Murlasits et al. (2018) found a pooled difference of 0.39 ml/kg/min (95% CI -1.03 to 1.81). Gao and Yu (2023) found SMD 0.02 (p = 0.859). Three independent reviews all report the same null. That asymmetry is why lifting first is the default recommendation: one order protects a real strength gain, and the other protects nothing measurable.

How long should I wait between cardio and weights?

At least three hours, and six or more is better. Schumann et al. (2022) pooled 43 studies and found the attenuation of explosive strength was significant when both modes ran in one session (p = 0.043) but not when they were separated by three hours or more. Robineau et al. (2016) trained 58 amateur rugby players for seven weeks with 0, 6 or 24 hours between the two qualities and found strength gains were lowest in the zero-hour group, while VO2peak improvement was highest in the 24-hour group. Their recommendation was to avoid scheduling the two qualities less than six hours apart.

Is it better to do cardio and weights on separate days?

For maximising both qualities, yes, but the difference is smaller than most people assume and separate days cost you an extra trip. Schumann et al. (2022) found no significant loss in maximal strength (SMD -0.06) or hypertrophy (SMD -0.01) from concurrent training overall, so the penalty being avoided is small to begin with. Separate days remove the order question entirely and give both sessions a fresh nervous system. If you can only train three or four times a week, stacking both in one session with the lifting first beats dropping one of the two modes.

Does a 10-minute cardio warm-up before lifting count as doing cardio first?

No. The studies in these meta-analyses used real endurance training doses, typically 20 to 60 minutes of continuous or interval work at a meaningful intensity, not a warm-up. A 5 to 10 minute easy bike or brisk walk raises muscle temperature and blood flow without generating the residual fatigue that drives the order effect. Keep it easy and keep it short. If your warm-up leaves you breathing hard, it stopped being a warm-up.

Does the order matter for fat loss?

No. Eddens et al. (2018) specifically tested body fat percentage across 167 participants and found an order effect of 0.68% (95% CI -0.97 to 2.33, p = 0.42), which is a null result. Fat loss is driven by total energy balance across the week, not by which half of a session came first. Pick the order that lets you complete both parts consistently, because the session you actually finish beats the perfectly sequenced one you skip.