There's working hard, and then there's working smart. This basic tenet is also applicable to working out. You can spend three hours in the gym each day, performing a mixture of jaw-building exercises (AKA chatting everyone up) and haphazard exercises. Or, you can spend less than an hour in the gym each day and make every last minute count.

One of the best ways to ensure that you are working out smart is have order. Not order in the judge-banging-a-gavel sense of the word, but with respect to the order in which you perform your exercises. For starters, if your workout calls for both cardio and resistance training on the same day, the proper order would be to perform your weight training first. Otherwise, you leave yourself with little energy left to complete your weight training.

This principle of order-importance training also factors into the performance of certain exercises. For example, if you are working your chest muscles, and you plan on doing dumbell flyes and barbell bench press, you should take care of the bench press first. Why? Because the bench press is a multi-joint move, making the larger muscles work the hardest and smaller muscles help stabilize them. Following this exercise with dumbell flyes -- a single-joint movement that targets the chest almost exclusively -- provides additional pump without putting the proverbial cart before the horse. Reversing this order will make your smaller muscles tired and less capable of assisting the larger ones. This, in turn, will decrease the amount of weight you can lift or the number of sets and reps you can do on the bench press, thereby curtailing your potential for maximum muscle response.

Unless you're purposely attempting to "pre-exhaust" your larger muscles (which is something only seasoned lifters should attempt), the order mentioned is the best approach you can take. While the order of what exercise you do and when you do it may seem somewhat trivial, it's actually a crucial component of a smart workout.