Fasted Cardio: Best For Fat Loss?

I would like to know if doing cardio right after a weight-lifting routine is o.k. I have heard due to the lactic acid build up, your cardio exercise is burning off the lactic acid before the fat calories. Is this a true statment.

Mike, I personally feel that you should leave a gap of at least 4 hours between weights and cardio (preferably one in the morning, and one in the afternoon/evening). After doing weights your body is in desperate need of sustenance (thus the Post-Workout shake of high-GI carbs and protein).

Doing an extensive cardio session after a heavy weights session is likely to be counterproductive (possible catabolic). That said - there are always people out there that break the mould.

Depends on your goals I guess.

I always run in the morning before I eat. I find that it helps me to stay focused and I don't have any food in my stomach to interfere with the run. Then, when I'm finished running, I shower and get ready and then eat breakfast (usually it takes me 30-45 minutes to get good and hungry after running). So I like the approach a lot.

Yes, I just lost 200 pounds in 5 minutes from cutting it off, This was a great solution!

I can't even pay my bills before breakfast, imagine do cardio. I'm useless without food.

I gotta eat in the morning..do u have any idea how long your not eating when your sleeping...its pretty long. Im a boxer who trains in more cardio than anyother kind of training mostly so in my opinion i believe that as long as its intense ..it doestn matter when you do cardio. judt do it.

Yeah, I've been doing hour sessions of cardio in the mornings before school on an empty stomach, ate about 6 small meals a day, follow my weight routines followed immediately by a 30+ minute cardio session depending on how tired I am, along with hydroxycut,now hydroxycut "hardcore" and yeah, I was 195 with like no muscle tone and a little shorter a few months ago,now I am 165 with muscle and a little taller, so just stick to it.

I been doing cardio before breakfast (abt 30/35 minute jog/interval at max heart rate 135) about 6 months now. It has worked wonders, my fat percentage has dropped from 15% before i started to below 10% now. (i'm 34 yo). There is a big danger that the pre-breakfast cardio session puts the body into catabolic state, resulting in muscle loss during the cardio exercise. I try to prevend this to a level (you can never for 100% avoid it) by taking some HMB and amino acids or whey protein (pure protein without carbohydrates) but with glutamine about 20 minutes before i start jogging. I also drink about half a liter of water. After returning i eat a high proteine breakfast with medium amounts of carbs. (for instance 100 gram tuna, 1 glass of milk, 50 gram muesli, 1 or 2 slice wholemeal bread with 30 gram chicken breast and half a banana. During the day i eat about 5 more meals.

During the 6 months i kept training hard in the gym and i even gained some muscle and strenght. ONe of the secrets of this is not to eat the same amounts of food (calories) every day. fat loss is caused by burning more calories then eating, but in order to gain muscle one normally needs to eat more calories then one burns. Therefore you need to vary your calorie intake between days, meaning that you should eat more before and after workouts to gain muscle and eat less in periods when you are not doing workouts , but still are doing cardio. When your goal is to lose fat your total (overall) calorie intake over a given period (for instance a week or a month) should be (slightly) lower then the calories you burned over that same period. When you do this zig zag routine the right way you will still manage to gain a little bit of muscle tissue while at the same time burning fat. It takes some experimenting though.

I just wanna say I'm impressed that you can stomach tuna for breakfast. I am the person who eats the weirdest things in the morning that I know, and I still couldn't do it.

Interesting. I've been doing my working out for years after coffee (2 cups) but before breakfast just because that's what works for my schedule. Can't vouch for the results tho cause my big eating problem is high carb snacking after dinner till bedtime. :-(
Still working on it!

The possibility of burning up of Lean Body Mass in pre-breakfast cardio seems a little sketchy to me provided that a supply of stored fats and stored muscle glycogen (not to mention an adequate supply of fasting blood glucose - which all non-diabetics would have) are all on hand. Quite honestly, unless someone DOES suffer from a metabolic disease like Diabetes, this is virtually always (99.9%) going to be the case.

I like to do cardio before breakfast - it just FEELS better than doing it after breakfast. Often I'll just start off with a quick glass of OJ or a serving of some other whole fruit simple carb before hitting it.

i would say do your cardio first thing in the morning before you eat anything and then eat a good breakfast this means protein carbs and little of fat i would say eat some multigrain cherios add quick oatmeal a scoop of whey protein and skim mil good luck

I have recently had good success with cardio 20 min with a 5 min cool down twice a day, 6 days a week. But On weight training days, I do 20-30 min of cardio in the morning and then weight train in the evening. I have decreased my total calories, but have increased my lean protien. I stay away from any fast food like its the devil. I have only been on this program for 6 weeks. In this time I have seen strength gains as well as a 20 pound loss in weight. I make sure that when I do Cardio, I am busting ass though. Keeping my heart rate between 150 and 160 for 20 min straight. Went hiking the other day and running up and down the hills didnt even break a sweat. I am definatley a believer in training twice a day. Also, I have read many, many times that training on an empty stomach will cause a catabolic state. the body goes for carbs, if no carbs it goes for protien, if no protien, it goes for YOUR protien. So it seems the trick is to eat a high protien breakfast, wait 30 min, and burn more than you ate. However, training twice a day, I really don't think someone would have any trouble losing weight, unless of course, they are grabbing some big macs for dinner every day. lol, keep the big macs close to the weight training. haha