One of the questions I am constantly being asked by clients is how do they know when they are in the fat burning zone and why it seems that the intensity is really low.

When training my clients at Fitness First in Manchester who want to lose weight I am not particularly interested in “Fat Burning” (well not totally). It is actually calorie burning that I concentrate on during my personal training sessions. While much has been made about the existence of a magical all consuming “fat burning zone,” it is actually one of the greatest myths when it comes to exercising and trying to lose weight.

The myth comes from the fact that when you are participating in lower intensity exercise, you are actually burning a higher percentage of calories from fat than from blood glucose (carbs). In theory this sounds great, but as most things that sound too good to be true there is usually a catch.

The first gap in the fat burning zone theory is that your body does not care how you burn the calories or what fuel was used in burning them. Your body gains or loses weight depending on whether or not you take in more calories than you burn or less calories than you burn. In other words, in order to lose weight, you must eat fewer calories than you use, because at the end of the day food is just fuel and body fat is just stored fuel that has not been burned.

Therefore, what we need to ask ourselves is:

Is it possible that we can burn more calories by deliberately reducing our intensity in the gym to make sure we stay in this magical “fat burning zone”?

The obvious answer to this is no, but how many people do we see in the gym walking, or on an exercise bike reading a book.  The simple truth is that you burn more calories by exercising for longer and at a higher intensity, not by slowing down.

The trick is to exercise at an intensity pace that challenges our bodies and, over time, increase the intensity as your fitness increases.

This will allow us to work harder over time and as a result burn more calories withing the same time frame in the gym. So getting fitter means you can work harder and you will lose more weight  faster.

The second problem with the fat burning zone theory is that even if it was true that it was more important to burn fat calories than total calories, the “fat burning zone” supporters would still be way off the mark.

Generally how this works is that when you reduce the intensity down to burn more fat you might burn 50% of your total calories from fat as opposed to maybe only 30% if you exercise at a higher intensity.

However, you also burn less calories in total; therefore you burn 50% of a lower amount of total calories!

To understand this a bit better take a look at the below figures for 30 min of cardio exercise for a person weighing 95kg:

Low intensity exercise 50% Fat burned
Total calories burned 120
Fat calories burned 60

High intensity exercise 30 %
Fat burned 30
Total calories burned 200
Fat calories burned 60

You can see that the higherintensity exercise wins on all counts,  both calories burned and the amount of calories from fat.

Tags: bodyfat, exercise, fat burning, personal training, Weight Loss
Posted in Fitness News, Weight Loss, Workouts | No Comments »

The recommended 30 minutes of exercise a day may not be enough to stop weight gain.

According to a US study of 34,000 women, 60 minutes a day of moderate exercise is needed to combat weight gain. The full story can be found on the BBC Website by following this link

Posted in Fitness News, Weight Loss | No Comments »