High Heart Rate Fat Loss

Your body burns a higher percentage of fat in a fat burning zone (Maybe 140 and under) but it burns more total fat in a higher heart rate zone.

So say you're bailing water out of a boat. If you're slow and careful you can fill the bucket up perfectly and carefully toss the water out of the side. The efficiency of effort to water removed is a premium. Of course if you started bailing water like a mad man you'd be using some of the effort to do more than move water, the bucket might not be totally full, and some of the water might even slosh out back into the boat. I'm sure you know that you'll be removing tons more water this way than with the first careful paced approach.

Same thing working out at a higher heart rate. Your body will have to pull in some glycogen stores for fuel because it can't convert fat that fast but it will be converting fat as fast as it can. Probably even at a higher rate than working out in a fat burning zone. After the exercise the glycogen used up in your muscles will need to be replenished so you're going to get some additional good out of this because your body will want to replenish that along with any fat loss so the calories you consume get used for that purpose as well.


Or in short. Don't worry about it. Work out at a rate that's good for you.

Rotflol!!! I googled "bailing water burns how many calories" and this is the first thing on my search results hahaha. I wanna know how many cals I burned this morning.

I wear a heart rate monitor during most of my workouts (Polar FT7) and consistently burn a lot of calories in my 45 - 60 minute workout. I always thought that was normal, but I've come to find that it's not so much. I'm realizing that my heart rate gets quite a bit higher than most people's in my workouts. My heart rate usually hovers around 170 - 186 in a cardio session. I have been told by my doctor that I have a fairly high heart rate but not high enough to be worried about.

So, cool - higher heart rate means more calories burned...but not so much fat. For example: Today I did a spin class for about 50 minutes (it was pretty intense) and a short strength training session. I burned about 1050 calories in 1 hour and 20 minutes, however my heart rate monitor showed that less than 2 minutes of that was burning fat!

What do I need to do to burn more fat in my workouts? Or is this even something to be concerned about and I should just keep on working out as I normally do? I've researched this a lot but some personal insight would be much more helpful at this point.

You need to reset or reprogram your HRM so that it reflects your true HRmax. Right now, you are getting nothing but garbage numbers.

And even if you do fix it, the "fat %" numbers are a complete fabrication. They should be ignored.