Optimum fat burn bpm

kellie7850

Hi all can someone help explain to me about the bpm categories. When working out in fat burn zone it doesn’t feel like I am working hard enough. I like to work out at 150bpm but need to loose fat. Do i need to ease off a bit ? I am 90kg average 41 yr old average resting rate of 65bpm

AnnPT77

kellie7850 wrote: »

Hi all can someone help explain to me about the bpm categories. When working out in fat burn zone it doesn’t feel like I am working hard enough. I like to work out at 150bpm but need to loose fat. Do i need to ease off a bit ? I am 90kg average 41 yr old average resting rate of 65bpm

No, you don't have to ease off. There are a lot of dumb myths about heart rate zones being propagated by the ignorant parts of the weight loss blogosphere.

As your heart rate goes up, there's a tendency for your body to shift the proportion of energy it gets from various sources. It's pretty good at this.

Oversimplifying ridiculously, as your heart rate goes up, the percentages shift. The so-called "fat burning zone" is the region where, in theory, a higher percentage of the calorie burn is coming from fat in the moment.

But this is really irrelevant for someone whose goal is weight loss. Whhhaaa? Two reasons:

At higher exercise intensity (which tends to correlate with higher heart rate), you burn more calories per minute than at lower intensity. But you may actually be burning a higher amount of fat, even when the percentage is lower, because arithmetic.

Just pulling number out of the air for illustration purposes: Suppose you burn 100 calories per hour doing an exercise at intensity X, and 70% of those calories come from fat in the moment. That would be 70 calories from fat. If you dramatically increase intensity (like increasing speed, if running), your heart rate is likely to go up, and let's say at this much higher intensity you burn 200 calories per hour, but with only 50% of that coming from fat. That would be 100 calories burned from fat, at the lower rate of 50%. See what I'm saying?

But here's the thing: You don't really care about that, either, if your goal is weight loss. Again, whaaa???

If you're trying to lose weight, you need a calorie deficit: You need to burn more calories than you eat, over a period of time. (This is true whether you're calorie counting or not.) You probably knew that.

Let's look at a 24-hour period. Let's pretend your daily calorie requirement to maintain your current weight is 2000 calories, but you're trying to net 1500 calories daily in order to lose a pound a week. If you did some magical 200 calories worth of exercise that burned 100% fat, you wouldn't lose weight any faster than someone who did 200 calories worth of exercise entirely from some fuel substrate other than fat (probably glycogen/carbs).

When you're in a calorie deficit, those deficit calories have to come from somewhere, at some time. If they can't come from your intake, they're eventually going to come from stored body fat (or, if you get a crazy high calorie deficit, from other useful body tissue like muscles - yikes!). Even if you burned no fat during your exercise, you body will burn fat to play catch-up. It may happen when you're sleeping, even. Who cares when it happens?

Frankly, you don't even care if the fat calories eventually burned are due to exercise, or due to window-shopping at the mall, or watching TV . . . in fact, you can't really tell where they came from. Who cares where they came from?

It's the calorie deficit that does the weight-loss work. Exercise is intended to increase calorie burn and let us lose the same amount of weight while eating a bit more (yay, enjoyment and nutrition!), as well as help us preserve muscle as we lose weight, help us be more fit (which feels great and helps us be healthier), and be fun.

For weight loss, for most people, the highest exercise calorie-burn sweet spot comes when you figure out how much time you can devote to your exercise of choice without messing up your overall life balance, then do that exercise for nearly all** of that time period at the highest intensity you can sustain during that time, without becoming so fatigued that it makes you drag through your daily life and wipe out some of the calorie benefits of the exercise. A brief "whew!" feeling right after the exercise is fine, but you want to feel energized and good for the rest of the day, not draggy and fatigued. (** The time should allow for a brief warm-up and cool-down period, especially if you're working at a higher intensity.)

Why does anyone care about the "fat burning zone"? Well, if someone is an endurance athlete, it can affect their fueling strategies: What to eat before or during exercise in order have good athletic training outcomes and good competitive performance.

If our goals are weight loss, all we really need to worry about is challenging ourselves, not getting overly fatigued, and (most importantly) having fun (because theoretically sub-standard exercise you do, burns more calories than theoretically perfect exercise you hate so much you avoid it at every opportunity).

Don't worry about the "fat burning zone". Just challenge yourself a bit, and have fun.

kellie7850

Thank you so much that’s very interesting and I can totally see where your coming from. I will continue to challenge myself and enjoy my workouts and work on the calorie deficit thank you