Cardio Before or After Weights? Mike Torchia and Rehan Jalali Answer

You lift three or four days a week. You put 40 minutes on the treadmill before the weights because that is what the people around you do. Six months in, the mirror has not changed and the workouts feel flat.

So: cardio before or after weights, and how much cardio per week does it take? On the August 6, 2025 episode of Live Well and Thrive, Mike Torchia put that question to Rehan Jalali, whom he introduced as a certified fitness and nutrition expert and the author of The Six Pack Diet Plan. Both men competed as bodybuilders, both have trained clients for decades, and both gave the same answer: less than you think, done harder than you are doing it.

The method side of that conversation, blood work, personalization, the base before the add-ons, is covered in the post on what a sports nutritionist does. This post takes the program-design side: how much cardio, at what intensity, in what order with the weights, which kind, and what to do when the plan stops working. Everything below is two men describing their own rules and what they have seen in their own clients. None of it is a prescription.

Both men’s answer to how much cardio per week is about ten hard minutes

Mike’s everyday cardio is short. He does it at the end of the workout, because he usually has to condense it, and he keeps it to 10 to 12 minutes. That is not a warm-up jog. He described the intensity as hard enough that the music is blasting and nobody wants the machine next to him, and then he is off it.

Jalali’s number is the same.

I like 10 minutes. I got 10 minutes. I’m done.

The number both men reject is an hour. Mike said he hears people describe an hour of cardio in the morning and another at night, and that he could think of something else to do with those two hours. Neither man gave a weekly total on the episode, so here is the arithmetic on Mike’s own numbers: 10 to 12 minutes, hard, at the end of the workout, and his workouts are a weekday standing appointment. That puts his ordinary week at an hour of cardio at the most, split into five short pieces. Competition season was different, and that comes below.

The phone-conversation test decides whether the minutes count

Ten minutes only works if the ten minutes are hard. Mike’s test for that is simple, and he applies it to the slow treadmill walk he sees on the cardio floor of his own gym.

If you can have a conversation on the phone, go home.

His reasoning is that a pace you could hold while talking is a pace you could hold in your car, and it produces nothing you will see. His phrase for it was walking on the treadmill like you’re walking in a garden. Jalali said on the episode that he has not seen Mike out of shape in 40 years, which is the receipt behind the rule.

Neither man used the phrase HIIT vs steady state cardio, so this post will not put the term in their mouths. That is the argument underneath the episode, though: a long, easy session or a short, hard one. Both men landed on short and hard decades ago and never went back. How much cardio per week you do is the wrong question until the minutes are hard. A phone-call pace is the pace to drop.

Cardio before or after weights? Never before, in Mike’s rule

Cardio before or after weights is the question Mike answered fastest, and in his telling the order matters more than the minutes. He was emphatic about it.

We never ever did cardio before weights. You should always separate it, or at least after the weights.

His explanation is about glycogen, and it is his view, not a lab result quoted on the show. Half an hour on a machine before the weights uses up the glycogen the muscles would have run on under the bar. The lifter then goes through the workout without a pump and, in Mike’s words, wonders why they are not making gains. He said he had watched exactly that at his gym recently: the cardio floor first, the weight room second, flat workouts as the result.

Jalali’s practice is a split. When cardio and weights land on the same day, he puts six to nine hours between them. Mike goes further: he would not put them in the same session at all, and if you have no choice, cardio goes last. Cardio after the weights, or on a different day is the rule both men train by. Neither gave a minimum gap from research; six to nine hours is Jalali’s habit, not a study.

Sprints are the cardio both men kept

Ask either man what form the ten minutes should take and the answer is sprints.

I’m a big fan of sprints. I think sprints is the number one cardio.

Jalali does them uphill or on a track. His evidence is what he says he saw with his own eyes: he worked with the Jamaican team at the 2012 Olympics, and the sprinters were shredded and muscular without doing much weight training. Put a sprinter next to a marathon runner, in his comparison, and the difference in development is the whole argument. That is his account; the episode cites no study behind it.

Mike’s sprints came from his competition years. The men he trained with in the Golden Era all sprinted, he said, and none of them ran distance, and the rule stuck. Three weeks out from a show, sprints three times a week, and no other cardio at all. He ran them late in the afternoon, before dinner, because he believes his metabolism slows at that hour and the sprints spike it. That timing is his reasoning, not something the episode tested. He says the sprints tapered his waist, and that hard training and food did the rest.

What the episode does not give you is a sprint workout. There is no distance, no rep count, and no rest interval anywhere in the hour, so this post does not invent one. If you are over 45 and have not sprinted since school, that is exactly the kind of thing to build with a coach and clear with a physician rather than copy from a blog.

When the program stalls, change it

Plateau is a word on Mike’s own intake list, and this episode gives a workout plateau two causes. Mike’s is the order problem above: the lifter who burns the glycogen first and then stalls under the bar. Jalali’s is adaptation.

Your body is very adaptive and it loves homeostasis. So we have to shock the body.

He says he varies the program with every client, including the ones he has kept for 15 and 20 years: adding something, taking something away, putting sprints in here and there. His point is that a program which worked for three months will not work forever, and a client who comes back five years later, older and with different goals, needs a different program again.

Mike’s side of it is the trainer who adjusts as he goes. A workout is written, then watched: if the chest is outgrowing the arms, the plan changes to bring the arms up. The body adapts, so the program has to change with it. Neither man said how often. Jalali says always and Mike says as you go, and those are the only intervals on the tape, so the honest answer to how often is: when the results stop. Adding more cardio to a stalled program is not on either man’s list.

The cardio you never schedule still counts

Mike’s ten minutes are not the only movement in his day, and the rest of it costs nothing. He parks on the top deck at his gym and jogs down the stairs. He power-walks up the stairs to the weight room. When the cardio is done, he jogs back down, then takes the garage stairs to the fifth floor in power lunges, two steps at a time. His line for it: he looks for a reason to walk further.

Jalali’s framing is that humans are built for movement, and that the trouble starts when people stop. His suggestion is smaller: park far from the store and take the extra walk. As he put it, workout has the word work in it.

Park on the top deck and take the stairs is not a cardio program. It is the layer under one, and it is the layer people skip while they ask how much cardio should I do and debate the treadmill. If you are counting how much cardio per week you owe, count this layer first.

How this fits the way Operation Fitness works

Everything above is two men describing their own rules, and neither claimed the rules were universal. Jalali said on the same episode that if a client hates cardio, he will not build the plan around cardio. That is the architect metaphor Mike uses for his own work: the program is designed for the body in front of him, from an assessment, then adjusted as the results come in, tested rather than guessed. Every program here is designed by Mike and delivered by his team, and the cardio in it is what your assessment calls for, in the order that protects your lifting. The programs page shows how the tiers are built.

Where to go from here

Watch the full episode with Rehan Jalali on YouTube. See how a program here sequences cardio, weights, and recovery around your assessment on the programs page. If your own training has stalled and you want a second set of eyes on your week, book a consultation.