When designing a workout plan that involves three or four sections on the days you exercise, their order matters and depends on your current strengths, weaknesses and goals. The arrangement in which you place workouts can differ between preparing correctly for a fitness test and being your best when lifting heavy weights. Depending on your goal and abilities, this is how it is recommended to order the exercises and events of your workout:

Heavy Lifting

When lifting heavy, you may want to start with the more technical lifts when you are fresh, then follow the heavier lifts with lighter accessories to your lifting goals. Any heavy-lifting exercise, such as deadlifts, should be included in a workout after a good warm-up and an easy technique set or two. If you incorporate pull-ups or farmer’s walks into a deadlift day, you may want to do them after deadlifts, because they could affect your grip strength and core for the heavier intensity required for that lift.

High-Repetition Calisthenics (Push-Pull-Core)

Building muscle stamina with higher-volume calisthenics is a common way to increase performance on push-ups, sit-ups and pull-ups on fitness tests. Many people think you can do them daily because they are calisthenics. That is not true with higher-volume workouts. Once you push yourself into hundreds of repetitions in a workout, you need a day or two to recover before doing them again.

One of the reasons why you are doing calisthenics is because you may have a calisthenics fitness test. Following the test order is recommended, but it should also be mixed in with running and swimming as an active recovery option. This combination of muscle stamina and endurance can build a higher performance capacity to help you recover fast and go all day. Every other day is recommended, as you need recovery time between workouts involving the same muscle groups. Otherwise, you will start seeing negative results and joint pain (tendinitis).

Fitness Testing

Of all the options, the order of the fitness test can drive how you order the workouts. If possible, for the Navy Physical Screening Test (PST), where you swim, do push-ups, sit-ups and pull-ups, and run, try arranging the workout to swim first, followed by calisthenics and then running. This applies to any fitness test. Learning to adjust from one exercise to the next with minimum rest helps you form a strategy for better test-taking.

A Mix of Calisthenics, Cardio and Weights

This trio is used in many tactical fitness workouts. We tend to warm up with calisthenics, using the muscles that we plan to focus on while lifting. For example, we will warm up the bench press with a few push-ups or do air squats in preparation for heavy squats. Then once you have properly warmed up, lift weights as heavy as you desire before cooling down with your preferred form of cardio. For our tactical athletes, we will typically top off leg days with rucking or swimming with fins and upper body days with biking or running.

A Mix of Lifting and Cardio

When doing combination events in a single workout, it depends on how heavy you are going with the weights, how long and hard you are going with the cardio, and which one you want to do first. I have found that lifting first and doing cardio second always produce a good lift and a little more difficult cardio session if you run on tired legs or a pumped-up upper body. However, if you do cardio first, you will do better in cardio and likely not see the optimal numbers in your lifts that follow the cardio session.

The final judgment on what to do first and last depends on prioritizing your primary and secondary goals. In training cycles, a primary goal could be building strength, with cardio endurance as a secondary goal. This will help you determine that you lift first and do cardio second.

Check out the Military.com Fitness Section. There, you will find many combinations of workouts for various goals. Weight loss, tactical fitness, fitness testing, and general health and wellness are consistently discussed.

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