So, if you want to increase your overall health and fitness, do your weight training (anaerobic ) exercises first to use up the blood glucose. Then, do cardio to get into an aerobic state so you can start to burn some of that body fat. As mentioned previously, your body reacts differently, physiologically speaking, when you do these various types of exercises. Remember, above, when I said that your body probably wouldn't burn fat if you did anaerobic exercise on an empty stomach? Well, that's because there is actually an order to which your body burns energy during your exercise routine. During anaerobic exercise, your body burns energy in this order: blood glucose, muscle, and rarely body fat. For aerobic exercise, it burns energy in this order: blood glucose, body fat, muscle.

Once you're done with your resistance training, move on to your aerobic workout. Aerobic, which translates to "with oxygen", means that during the burning/combustion of the energy source within the cell oxygen is needed to complete the process. Aerobic exercise is a high calorie burn state. A general guideline to determine if you are in this state is based on heart rate and respiration rate. A general heart rate of 120-160 is conducive to being in an aerobic state. An important thing to remember is that while in this state and you are definitely burning body fat as an energy source. But, your window of opportunity is only approximately 30 minutes. After that, you could be burning valuable muscle. So, get your muscle workout in before your cardio to reduce your glycogen stores, then burn fat with your cardio workout.

It's strategies like this that we use at Arizona Elite Bootcamp. Contact us find out how you too can benefit from the right exercises in the right order and have more fun while you get fit.