Most of us hit the gym to drop pounds and build a lean, firm physique. The key to getting there is to learn how to work with your body. ReEvolution makes this easy. Burning fat and building a trim, toned body efficiently and easily requires integrating weight training with cardio and proper nutrition. Lifting weights is critical, even if your goal is to lose fat without gaining muscular bulk. As long as you lift in a high rep range, avoid training to “failure” (the point where you can’t do any more reps) and do cardio after you lift, you shouldn’t build bulky muscle.

The nutrition side of burning fat and getting toned is covered in our nutrition section on Losing Weight. Details of how to exercise to burn fat and get toned are covered below. Before diving into the material here, be sure you’ve read our Exercise Overview and Getting Started with Exercise. Then come back to this section to learn how to drop pounds with maximum efficiency.

1. Timing is Everything

Warm up first, then hit the weights, then do cardio. This time-honored formula will maximize the effects of both your lifting and cardiovascular workouts. A 6-8 minute cardiovascular warm up (do it in intervals, check out our Exercise Overview for why) will rev up your adrenals, preparing your body to burn fat later in your workout, as well as mobilizing energy to fuel your weight lifting. Rest for a couple of minutes after you warm up before you start lifting to let your heart and lungs recover.

After a warm up and a two minute rest, your system will be primed to tap into muscular glycogen stores. Glycogen is a fast burning energy molecule that you store in your muscles and liver. Because it is rapidly converted into usable energy in muscle cells, glycogen is ideally suited to fuel resistance training, which requires concentrated bursts of energy. More information about glycogen and fueling your workouts is available under Eating for Performance.

In general, your body burns up glycogen before it burns fat. What this means is that if you start your workout by jumping on a treadmill and running for 30 minutes, a lot of the calories you burn will be glycogen, rather than fat. If you then try to lift after cardio, you won't have any glycogen in your system to fuel your lift. You can't really use fat stores to fuel resistance training (fat burns to slowly) so you won't be able to lift with the same level of intensity. As a result, doing cardio before lifting really doesn't make sense. Your cardio workout ends up burning glycogen rather than fat, and you get a sub par lift since you don't have any glycogen left.

Conversely, doing cardio after weights ensures a better lifting session and a more effective fat burning cardio session as well. You’ll use the glycogen stored in your muscles to work out at max intensity for the 20 minute duration of your weight training routine. The energy you’ll get from your glycogen stores will help you get a great workout lifting, which will really help you shed fat since recovering from a good lift and building new lean muscle requires loads of calories. In addition, once you've used up the glycogen stored in your muscles, your body will be forced to burn fat to fuel you through the cardio workout that follows.

Lifting before cardio also raises your metabolism, meaning that your cardio workout burns more calories overall. As a result of both of these effects, doing cardio after weights maximizes fat burning. A complete personalized exercise program, including warm up, weights, and cardio, is available as part of your free ReEvolution Health and Fitness Action Plan.