"Fat-Burning Zone" = Just Laziness

Having fat-loss as one of your goals means you should be performing intense interval work. I’ve posted studies in the past showing this as an extremely efficient way of losing fat, but in case you missed it here are a few of them…

• International Journal of Obesity in 2008 did a study on the effects of high intensity intermittent exercise training on fat loss and found that the group performing 20 minutes of interval training lost more body fat than the group performing 40 minutes of steady state training.
• In 1994 Metabolism did a study in which they compared two different modes of training on body fat and muscle metabolism. They found that the high intensity intermittent training group had greater subcutaneous fat loss than the endurance training group. In fact they concluded that “vigorous exercise favors negative energy and lipid balance to a greater extent than exercise of low to moderate intensity“.
• The Journal of Physiology in September of 2006 reported similar initial adaptations in human skeletal and exercise performance when comparing short-term sprint intervals versus traditional endurance training.

Is it difficult? Yes, which is why more people choose to run like gerbils on treadmills for 45 minutes instead of exercising with intensity.

Fat loss is about calorie expenditure. You need to burn more calories than you take in. The excuse about how you “barely eat anything but still can’t seem to lose weight” doesn’t make any sense. Your body can’t produce something out of nothing so either you are lying about how much you eat or you are simply unaware of the total amount of calories you are ingesting.

The bottom line is that in order to create a calorie deficit you need to eat less and move more. Despite what you may think, there is actually a more efficient way of doing this without having to resort to your daily morning ritual of spending time on every piece of cardio equipment the gym has to offer.

While you may burn a few calories hopping from the treadmill to the Precor machine, your goal should be to burn the most amount of calories possible in the time you spend exercising. This is why interval training at a higher intensity can help you out.

For those of you defending steady-state cardio by claiming “I’m in my fat-burning zone“, think about this: while your body may use a greater percentage of fat as energy during low-intensity aerobic training, the total number of calories burned when compared to exercising at a higher intensity is less. All of you with fat-loss goals should not solely be concerned with the amount of fat being utilized during your workout but with the total number of calories you’re expending.

And in case that wasn’t a good enough reason…

[Via http://envisionedhealth.wordpress.com]