A question...

Queen_Christine

If you work out twice a day for 30 minutes will you burn less calories than if you work out once a day for an hour? I have an exercise chart that says you don't start burning fat till after 20 minutes. If that's true then 2 short workouts are useless.

Opinions / educate me?

lindalou0703

bump

gsager

Bump

sarah44254

You are always burning calories. If you are alive, you are burning calories. I can't say if you burn fat after a certain amount of time, but I will say that I have spent months doing exercises from bodyrock.tv, which are rarely more than 12 minutes long. I would do one 12 minute workout a day. During that time, my body fat reduced from 38% to 34%, so even though I never did workouts longer than 20 mins, I still burned fat.

Short workouts are NEVER useless. Working out will help your body, be it 2 minutes or 200 minutes.

gec1266

It depends on the exercises as well.....

robin52077

You are always burning calories. If you are alive, you are burning calories. I can't say if you burn fat after a certain amount of time, but I will say that I have spent months doing exercises from bodyrock.tv, which are rarely more than 12 minutes long. I would do one 12 minute workout a day. During that time, my body fat reduced from 38% to 34%, so even though I never did workouts longer than 20 mins, I still burned fat.

Short workouts are NEVER useless. Working out will help your body, be it 2 minutes or 200 minutes.

this

myofibril

This is an article by Christian Finn on the subject. If you can't be bothered to read it all you need to know is don't worry about the " 20 minutes before fat burning starts" nonsense, worry about total calories. If you achieve that better as an individual doing one workout then do that. If you want to split them up into two smaller sessions then do that instead.

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Busting the twenty-minute fat-burning myth

Back in 1999 when I was studying full-time at university, and working both a full-time and a part-time job, one of the big challenges I faced was making the time to exercise.

When I started university, I often failed to make it to the gym at all, even for just 20 or 30 minutes. And even if I did manage to summon the enthusiasm to train, by the time I'd finished changing and warming up, it was almost time to leave again.

However, after several weeks of moaning and complaining to anyone who would listen that it was now "impossible" for me to do any exercise at all, I decided to do something about it. My plan was to cut each workout in half. Driving to work in the morning, I'd stop at the gym and get the first half done. On the way back home at night, I'd do the second half.

However, a few people I spoke with told me that this idea was "silly" and "wouldn't work."
"Your body doesn't start burning fat until you've been exercising for at least 20 minutes," they told me. I was warned that I "wouldn't lose any fat at all" unless I did at least 45 minutes of continuous aerobic exercise.

It's true that your body relies more on carbohydrate and less on fat during the early stages of exercise. It's also true that your body uses more fat and less carbohydrate the longer you spend exercising. But this ignores what happens to your metabolism after exercise, when the number of fat calories burned tends to go up.

To lose fat, you need to create a calorie deficit — to consistently burn more calories than you consume. And it doesn't make a great deal of difference whether those calories are burned in one long workout or several shorter ones.

Some evidence for this comes from research carried out at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. For the study, a group of overweight women was assigned to one of two groups. Group one performed a single bout of exercise lasting 20-40 minutes. Group two did the same amount of exercise, but it was split into several smaller bouts lasting just 10 minutes.

And the result?

Twenty weeks later, the women who split their workouts into shorter bouts had lost 20 pounds, compared to just 14 pounds in the single-bout group. The reason for the extra weight loss is simply that the women in group two did more exercise and burned more calories than the women in group one.

Research published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition shows similar results.

Three 10-minute bouts of exercise per day worked better for weight loss than two 15-minute bouts or one 30-minute bout.

Changes in body composition weren't reported in this study, so we don't know how much of the lost weight came from muscle and how much came from fat. I'm guessing that the women lost some muscle, which is fairly common with aerobic-only exercise programs. When you're losing weight, it's important to do some kind of resistance training to help preserve lean muscle (see How to Fight Fat and Win and Lift Weights and Lose Fat in the Members-Only Area for more information).

Fat is stored energy. To lose it, you have to use more energy (calories) than you get from your diet. And it doesn't really matter whether you burn those calories in one long workout or several shorter ones. As these studies (and my own experience) show, both approaches work.

reepobob

I tried doing two a days to stimulate quicker results and I noticed my second workout was always disappointing. I tended to still be fatigued from the first workout, so I got in the habit of having one good workout per day and worked in a once a week rest day where I may just do some mildly exhausting chores around the house to make up for the lack of structured exercise.

There is such a thing as overtraining...you should be able to get the same benefits from one longer workout per day versus two shorter sessions...plus why do you want to sweat and potentially have to wear more than one exercise outfit per day...then again, if your schedule only allows for two shorter sessions per day, knock yourself out...

Trust your body, it will tell what is working and what is not...

LTGPSA

I would go with the numbers. If you've done 30 minutes twice, I'd use the total of the 2 sessions. If you've done 60 minutes once - what is the comparison - was it more, less? Seems like 30 x 2 or 60 x 1 results should be close. Now, I'm going to have to test it and see. :flowerforyou: