Run Before or After a Workout? (Goal Oriented Answer)

Running improves your cardiovascular health and aerobic agility, burns more calories, improves sleep quality, and enhances muscular endurance and muscle strength.

Additionally, running before a workout might boost your mood and mental readiness for strength training, while running afterward could provide a calming, stress-relieving effect.

Many endurance athletes today know that to train efficiently, they need to do more than just run.

Cross-training is currently widely regarded as the most effective universal technique for enhancing athletic prowess, mobility, and general emotional well-being.

Cross-training involves:

• Varying your exercises.
• Targeting your cardiovascular system.
• Working different muscle areas, lower and upper body.
• Using both slow and quick twitch muscles.

The answer to whether you should run before or after a workout depends on several factors, including:

• What are your general fitness objectives?
• What do you hope to gain?
• How would you like to improve?

Running or other types of cardio may be a difficult exercise on their own, but most runners understand that a strength workout routine is a crucial supplement to running miles.

Your fitness goals dictate your exercise sequence. Want to boost your running mileage and prevent injuries? Pair running with weightlifting.

If you're a runner focused on health or aiming to lose weight through cardio and strength training, your main fitness goal determines the first exercise.

Runners should run before gym sessions. Those focusing on muscle building or strength should lift weights before cardio.

Prioritizing your primary workout ensures optimal performance, as my experience with clients demonstrates.

The second exercise, scheduled after the primary one, supports the first, mitigating the fatigue known as 'interference, often felt during subsequent sessions.

To build and maintain muscle mass, focus on hypertrophy weight training in your gym routine.

Consistently lifting heavier weights with 8 to 12 reps leads to muscle strain and, as the Journal of Immunology Research indicates, microtrauma and glycogen depletion [2].

This process, essential for muscle protein synthesis, strengthens and enlarges muscles, enhancing their resilience to similar future workouts.

Running before weightlifting can drain the energy needed for these intense sessions, reducing muscle contraction effectiveness, particularly in the lower body, and potentially impairing form due to fatigue. This is supported by Public Library of Science research [3].

In my experience as a fitness trainer, I recommend clients aiming for muscle growth conclude their sessions with light cardio, like a 10-minute jog, to promote blood flow without compromising muscle-building efforts.

Related: How to Build Muscle Without Weights?

If You Want to Increase Endurance

The same concept applies here, which says you must emphasize weightlifting if you want to improve strength and aerobic capacity.

A hard workout day prior to running performance may tire the muscles, leading you to compromise good form when performing cardio and increasing your chance of injury.

If you're preparing for a run, using weights before cardio may reduce your stamina.

As per a study in the journal Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism, people who did strength training before running had worse running impairment than those who ran first [4].

My clients and I have compiled a list of the best pre-workouts for running, and their contribution to our workouts has been incredible.