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

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

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 emotions of 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 are the major determinant of the ideal schedule for your back-to-back exercises.

Do you want to enhance your running mileage with weight lifting to prevent injuries and general strength?

Are you a strength-based runner who trains for health? Is your aim to lose weight by combining cardio and strength training?

In most circumstances, your primary or major fitness goal is the exercise you should perform first.

If you are a runner, you must run before your gym activity. If your aim is bulking or increasing physical prowess, you should lift weights before running or doing cardio. 

By performing your primary workout first, you will guarantee that your system is strong, adequately fed, and ready to perform that key exercise.

Because of a phenomenon known as interference, it is usual to feel exhausted for your second session.

Nevertheless, if you schedule your secondary exercise after your major one, the endurance performance drop caused by the first training session would be less bothersome because the second session is merely supposed to support your first exercise.

Lifting weights ought to be the major emphasis of your gym practice if you want to build and retain muscle mass. Particularly hypertrophy weight training.

Lifting big weights and straining your muscles will result in microtrauma, swelling in the muscular tissue, and a depletion of glycogen (carbohydrate) reserves [2].

Muscle protein production happens as an aspect of the recovery process. This makes muscular tissue powerful and larger than before.

So the next time your muscles are subjected to the same workout stimulus, they will be better prepared to deal with it.

So, if you want to gain muscle, you must expend energy by lifting weights. Running before lifting depletes the circulating sources of energy required for large lifts [3].

Furthermore, the repeated motion of running lowers the effectiveness of muscular contractions, especially in the lower body. As a result, you become tired, and your muscular contractions become less effective.

Your form may even deteriorate as an outcome of the exhaustion and repeated contractions required to complete a run.

I advise clients whose main aim is to gain strength and optimize muscle growth to finish workouts with a light cardio session in the form of a 10-minute jog or a low-intensity cardio workout that will increase blood flow.

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 weight 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, persons who did strength training before running had worse running impairment than those who ran first [4].