Best Way to Burn Fat
Best way to burn fat
Your Body Stores Energy in many different forms
First, be aware that when you burn energy by moving, this is not the fat reserves that leave first, far from it! For efforts lasting a few seconds, It burns in the first stocks available directly to the muscles (ATP and creatine). For efforts lasting a little longer (several tens of seconds), glycogen is used (derived from glucose present in the muscles). It is only after three to four minutes that you begin to mobilize your reserves of carbohydrates outside of the muscles, and finally fat.
Don't put too much intensity in your workouts!
Your body does not draw equally in your reserves of carbohydrates and lipids. Everything depends on the intensity of your effort. And contrary to what one might think, it is a moderate and prolonged effort which will mainly engage in lipid reserves, because intense exercises burn primarily carbohydrates, available more quickly (but with reserves dwindling fast). Walking or cycling for example, are excellent ways of burning stored fat. We can base the evaluation of the intensity of effort on a parameter, different for each individual, called the VO2 max, which is the maximum volume of oxygen consumed by someone while exercising. The volume of oxygen used per unit time is directly proportional to the intensity of your efforts during that time, so that makes it an excellant gauge. The best exercises to burn fat are between 40 and 50% of VO2 max.
The balance between carbohydrates and fat burning
In moderate efforts, we burn a lot of fat and some carbohydrates, and this ratio is reversed during intensive efforts. But it is possible to shift the balance so that even with exercises of increasing intensity, we continue to burn fat and prevent the body from burning sugar too fast. For this, we must promote endurance training. The more you train, the more your body consumes fat when you exercise, even as it gets more intense. This is logical, as the body adapts to the type of activity you're doing on a regular basis: it favors consumption of fat, which supports the effort longer as compared to the reserves of carbohydrates, which are quickly exhausted. Moreover, not only endurance training lowers fat reserves, but it is mainly the amount of abdominal fat that gets lowered over subcutaneous fat; it is the former that is directly responsible for health risks.
Not all fats are made equal
But as it is possible to improve the performance of its body to burn fat, there is also an obstacle to this phenomenon ... starting with a paradox: the greater the fat mass, the more difficult it is to get rid of it! there is an inverse relationship between the Body Mass Index (BMI) and the capacity of muscles to burn fat stock. Thus, it was shown that in obese, muscles burn fat only at half the rate found among non-obese. The reasons for this are many: fat comes less easily to the muscles, and those muscles are less rich in type I fibers, which burn more fat. Indeed, endurance training induces the production of type I muscle fibers...
Fat burning secret? Develop endurance
It is no secret: we must focus on endurance, that is, we must insist on the regularity and repetition of our exercises to lose weight. That way you stimulate your body in a regular manner. Clearly, it is better to do five times 30 minutes of moderate exercises in a week than 2 hours and a half of sports on weekends! You can start by doing some brisk walking, and you might consider some cycling or swimming.
Ready to get started? You can read my article on the best exercises to lose weight.