cardio/weights program balance

Little reluctant to post this thread as I can guess the answer but oh well.

I used to do a slightly modified version of the ptc beginers program 3 times a week. After realising my fitness/endurance was lacking I decided to include a cardio program on my off days. Anyway I've found with my situation I'm a lot more consistant doing my cardio program then the weights. Now I've ended up doing just the cardio 3 times a week.

Cardio program looks like:
12m walking lunges w dbs, then a 12m sprint, then 12m walk x4
(all of the below pairs are alternated across 4 min tabata intervals)
pushups and punches
bridges and spiders
bent rows and theroband rows
squats and straight leg deadlifts
overhead press and overhead punches
db curls and theroband curls
chair dips and skull crushers
then 15m incline sprint and 15m walk every 30 secs for 4 minutes

I love this routine, it wrecks me and it's short and I can do it all with 10kg dbs so it's efficient and convenient.

Anyway my question is if I just do this routine 3 times a week would I get much if any muscle atrophy or strength gains? Or would it be better done how I was doing it with monday cardio, tuesday weights, weds rest, thurs cardio, fri weights, weekend rest? Also any suggestions for program alterations are welcome.

Hope this isn't too bad as far as noob posts go.

imo you're best to combine both the strength, and cardio based, exercises into the same program. If you're doing all that in a circuit fashion I can see your strength and hypertrophy (atrophy is when your muscle wastes away) very extremely minimal.

Pick a basic, 3 exercise, program such as a Starting Strength variation, or Pendlay's program for MMA fighters then follow it with weighted, metabolic, conditioning of some description. Whether it be mini circuits, timed exercises, complexes, sprints etc. There are many options.
If you think even with 3 sets of 3 exercises in the SS program is too much you can reduce it to one working set an exercise, or even just 1 exercise each session (eg day 1 squats+conditioning, day 2 press+conditioning, day 3 deadlift+conditioning)

Any template where progression can be recorded is a good template.

Would it be safe to say that you only have access to 10kg db?

The Hamburgler said:

imo you're best to combine both the strength, and cardio based, exercises into the same program. If you're doing all that in a circuit fashion I can see your strength and hypertrophy (atrophy is when your muscle wastes away) very extremely minimal.

Click to expand...

yeah its much like a circuit, also sorry I meant hypertrophy (2am posting )

Pick a basic, 3 exercise, program such as a Starting Strength variation, or Pendlay's program for MMA fighters then follow it with weighted, metabolic, conditioning of some description. Whether it be mini circuits, timed exercises, complexes, sprints etc. There are many options.
If you think even with 3 sets of 3 exercises in the SS program is too much you can reduce it to one working set an exercise, or even just 1 exercise each session (eg day 1 squats+conditioning, day 2 press+conditioning, day 3 deadlift+conditioning)

Click to expand...

Okay cheers, seems I'll have to do some more reading and reaccess things.

sookie said:

Would it be safe to say that you only have access to 10kg db?

Click to expand...

Nah I have about 130kgs of weights. Tabata intervals just make it hard to do more at my current strength level. Unless I stop to adjust weights between exercises for squats, deads etc.

Stop to adjust weight per exercise would be the sensible thing to do