A commonly recognized heart rate range for optimizing fat loss is 60 – 70% of your maximum heart rate, give or take 5% on either end. Nonetheless, many exalted voices in the fitness industry insist that you must get your heart rate up to the 80 – 90% range to burn the most fat calories if really want to get serious about weight loss.
The suggestion for accomplishing this is mostly with a difficult mix of aerobic and anaerobic work, cross training or interval training among various other higher heart rate modalities.
On popular “weight loss” television shows you can witness overweight people suffering in misery as their fitness trainers subject them over and over again to these types of workouts. You’ll also notice that those poor overweight folks on those television shows require constant verbal re-enforcement to buck up their discipline and will-power and to keep them from quitting.
Now, it is quite true that from a purely physiological standpoint, this type of workout will burn the highest amount of body fat. It should be understood, that the quantity of actual “fat” calories burned does increase as the heart rate and intensity go up. But they do so at a rapidly diminishing rate. Nonetheless, numbers don’t lie and more fat calories are in fact burned. Still, there is one big hitch…
YOU WILL BURN NO BODY FAT WHATSOEVER IF YOU NEVER ACTUALLY GET UP AND DO THE EXERCISE BECAUSE YOU THINK THE EXERCISE SUCKS AND YOU HATE DOING IT BECAUSE IT’S LIKE FREAKING TORTURE!
Unfortunately…that’s a pretty big “hitch”. Even if you exert great will-power and complete the exercise that you think sucks and that you really hate – will you do that indefinitely? Nope! That would be highly unlikely.
Yet, you WILL dance, play dodge ball, beach volley ball, touch football, skateboard, practice Judo, surf, play with your dog, or go for a hike….BECAUSE YOU MAY REALLY LIKE SOME OF THAT STUFF AND….IT DOESN’T FREAKING SUCK!
The notion that we must be “upping the intensities” of our workouts as the best answer to getting lean is very popular these days. It is also myopic, vacuous, out of context, and in the end failing most of us.
In fact, the over-use of this misconception keeps millions of us from effectively moving our bodies because we associate “exercise” with pain and hardship. We also tend to confuse the less strenuous, analytic approach (explained in the next few paragraphs) with something that is patronizing and far less effective because it is not “painfully difficult to get through”. This is totally untrue.
The really hard forms of exercise that combine intense aerobic and anaerobic work involve primarily our phosphagen and glycolytic metabolic energy systems. Now, it’s important to know that body fat does not directly fuel those energy systems. Rather, phosphogens and glycogen (derived from the carbohydrates we eat) provide the substrate fuels for those energy systems that dominate when we do the really intense forms of exercise that most of us hate.
Here’s the important thing about the phosphagen and glycogen energy systems – YOU RUN OUT of those energy substrates sources. That is why we cannot continue a workout indefinitely at super high levels of intensity. The more you increase your intensity, the less body fat you will be burning as a percentage of the energy you are using, and the more of those other energy substrates you will be burning.
This is why, as we increase our intensities, we do burn off more body fat, but at a rapidly diminishing rate as those other fuel sources take over.
What about the third energy system – oxidative phosphorylation? That is the primary system used for slower, less arduous, far less intense forms of exercise – walking your dog, playing Frisbee, etc. – and when we are sedentary or sleeping. The primary raw fuel source used to provide the substrate fuel for this energy system is body fat.
That is because this energy system involves oxygen which is required to utilize fat, which is a much slower burning, but far more efficient raw fuel. Now, the vast majority of us who are struggling with our fitness goals have no worry about “running out” of body fat. Nope, quite the contrary, we want to burn it off with a vengeance!
So, if you are using primarily the oxidative energy system to burn off your body fat, then that means you DID NOT use much of the other two aforementioned sources of fuel and their respective energy systems. That means they will be reserved and available for something really important – BUILDING MUSCLE. Once muscle is created and maintained, this active tissue burns fat all day long, even when we are at rest.
Further, a workout used primarily to build muscle will deliver the greatest increase in resting metabolic rate – even more so than the painful aerobic/anaerobic mixed workouts described in the first paragraph. Why is that important? Because resting metabolic rate is responsible for approximately 70% of your overall energy consumption.
If your diet is in caloric equity, the primary source of that energy will be…..BODY FAT!
When you understand and apply this knowledge of how your body utilizes different forms of raw fuel to power the different energy systems, you won’t be doing stuff that sucks, because the stuff that most of us seem to enjoy as exercise is lower in intensity. Don’t worry, you won’t be “falling behind” because you are not doing all the “hard work” we are so often told is mandatory.
In short, you will be training smarter, not harder in order to build muscle and lose body fat. Summarizing, the really important message here is:
HARD, PAINFUL EXERCISE THAT SUCKS
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FAT LOSS SUCCESS
If you use the appropriate energy systems more exclusively for the type of training they are meant for you will be building valuable muscle with a vengeance, and actually enjoying exercise. These two types of “workouts” will now be separated in various ways. Consider this a form of “unidirectional” training, where all things have their appropriate and corresponding place.
Here is the really cool part. We know that the lower intensity oxidative energy system uses fat as the primary raw fuel, but it burns the least overall amount of fat relative to the other energy systems. Re-capping, if our diet is in check, we don’t care, since that fat will visibly be coming off of our bodies and the exercise doesn’t suck because we like it. Now, once people start “liking” something, they tend to do more of it and more often.
When that happens, they start to get better at it. When all these wonderful things take place, they naturally tend to increase their intensity levels, right back into the other two systems – which do in fact BURN MORE OVERALL FAT! Now, you have consistency, passion, enjoyment, AND maximal fat loss. Otherwise, they can just choose to cruise along at a lower intensity and the fat comes off anyway.
I see people having their proverbial “exercise-cake” and eating it too – all of the time. The first key is to actually “like” something. Then, over time I see them dance faster, advance further into their martial art, rock climb higher, buy faster bicycles, and hike taller mountains at a faster pace.
Losing and controlling body fat becomes so ridiculously easy for these folks that this issues never rears its head as a problem – ever again. They understand how all this works and they just apply it, happily and harmoniously. They never again complain about having to “work-out”.
I have personally witnessed hundreds of people begin to understand and apply this use of our energy systems and their respective primary substrates sources of fuel over and over again with resounding success. Especially when following what is primarily our human evolutionary diet, many have lost over 100 pounds of fat in under a year – with ease. Yet, something even more wonderful occurs – they continue, indefinitely.
I’ve condensed these ideas into a simple to read and follow system called “The Eco-Diet.” To learn more about healthy eating, and to put together a simple to follow diet eating plan, click on this link.