Strength or cardio first?
My understanding is that it depends on your goals, Danielle.
If you are trying to focus on building lean muscle, the conventional wisdom is to do your strength work first. Warning: if you do this, expect to have less energy during your cardio workout.
If you are trying to build cardio endurance or capacity, do your cardio workout first. In this case, you'll find you may be more tired during your strength work and might find yourself fatiguing faster or able to lift a little less.
If your goal is fat loss, you have to find the best balance between strength work and cardio work to achieve this. If you've already got a solid muscle base but are weak on cardio, you'll probably see better results if you focus on the cardio. But if you need to firm up and add some muscle, you should focus on the strength work. Both strength and cardio burn fat, just in different ways. (And don't forget flexibility of course!)
You may find other factors influence your decision. For me, I HAVE to do cardio first, strength second because of my kids. I work out early in the morning and they usually wake up before I'm done. I can blast through my strength work with an audience of pre-schoolers, (well, my daughter tries to mess up my count sometimes ...) but I find it impossible to do my cardio workouts without kicking one of them in the head. And so, I do cardio first.
Of course, I love cardio the most anyway. So that works for me!
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