Ordering Your Workout Activities

When I first started going to the gym I was, like most people trying to lose weight, keen to start on some serious fat burning aerobic exercise. It didn't take much experimentation before I realised that if I did the resistance parts of my workout (weights) first, it made my arms and legs tired enough that a short way into my aerobic workouts (usually treadmill or bike), I'd start to feel worn out and not want to carry on. So I started doing it the other way around - I'd do my aerobic workout, feel great, then do my resistance at the end. Then I noticed that my muscles were feeling decidedly small for the amount of work I was doing on the weight machines. Then I did some research. Then I found out that (surprise, surprise), i'd been doing it all wrong.

Whichever type of exercise you are doing, your muscles are going to need energy to carry it out. This energy ideally comes from glucose that's hanging out in your blood stream, not doing anything useful. However, different types of exercise have different energy requirements:

• Aerobic exercise (running/rowing/biking) requires a slow trickle of energy over a long period of time

• Anaerobic exercise (resistance/weights) will usually require a huge amount of energy over a very short period of time.

Now, when you first start either type of exercise you'll have quite a lot of glucose hanging around in your blood, all ready to fuel your exercise, so lets see what happens when you do your resistance work first:

• You start to use massive amount of energy with your resistance work
• Your body starts to release glucose from fat, your blood glucose is getting lower
• You then stop and move onto your aerobic workout
• At this point, the new blood glucose is starting to trickle through, and can power your muscles

And now, what happens if you do it the other way around, as I was initially:

• You start to use a trickle of energy for your aerobic workout
• The drop in glucose is slow enough that your body can properly regulate the release of glucose from fat. You have the energy that you need, but your blood glucose is still a little on the low side
• You then stop and move onto your resistance workout
• Now your muscles need a massive amount of energy available very quickly, and... oops - there is none.

Now two things start to happen. First, you feel very tired very quickly, but secondly and most horrifically, your muscles start to do the only thing that they know how to do to carry on working when there is no blood glucose available - they start to break themselves down to be their own energy source. Yikes!

The above is probably full of factual inaccuracies that would make a medical professional scream in disgust, but the basic point is that this is why I was finding my resistance work quite hard, and also not gaining muscle in the way that I wanted.

I changed the ordering of my workout (and threw in a banana before my workout for an extra energy boost for my resistance work) and the results came quickly. The resistance work was much easier, and my muscle mass started to rise a lot quicker. Aerobic workout is still harder after my resistance work, but it's something that I can live with, knowing that i'm doing the right thing for my long term goals.

If you've made the same mistake, I hope that this helps you change too.