The first thing to realize with exercising is just because you are burning calories does not mean that you are burning fat. Your primary goal in exercising should be to drop body fat, and you cannot drop body fat by simply burning calories. The key is to constantly eat less calories than you need to consume if you re trying to lose fat, until you reach your weight goal. If you want to burn fat, especially as part of a weight loss program, you have to burn more calories each day than you consume.
The way to keep burning calories from fat hours after your workout is with the anaerobic exercises in your weight workouts. This means that after your workout, your body does not keep using stored energy and burning calories. The calories that you burn while doing your resistance exercise are primarily carbohydrates calories (meaning that you need to eat even more calories for energy each day); but the calories that you burn while resting are mostly fat calories.
As you age, your amount of muscle tends to shrink, and fat makes up more of your bodyweight, which slows your caloric burn. Muscle tissue is more metabolically active and burns more calories than fat tissue. This means people who have more muscle tissue burn more calories and are able to keep weight off easier. Males typically have less body fat and more muscle mass than females at a similar age and body mass, meaning males burn more calories.
Lifting weights and maintaining muscle helps your metabolism stay high, even when you are cutting calories. Adding more muscle through lifting weights and doing other endurance exercises also helps with fat burning, especially if you are dieting as well.
Resistance training can also help maintain lean body mass, which may increase the amount of calories your body burns while it is at rest (3). According to a study, resistance training for 10 weeks could help raise resting calorie expenditure by 7%, and it may decrease fat weight by 4 pounds (1.8 kg) ( 4 ).
According to one study, performing HIIT helped individuals burn up to 30% more calories in the same time frame compared with other types of exercise, such as biking or jogging (48). Low-intensity exercise is also a good way to burn calories, you just need to exercise for longer periods.
Working out low-intensity is not necessarily bad, but if you are not burning more calories than you are eating, then you are not going to get rid of any extra body fat. It is also true that working with lower intensities will cause you to burn more fat than carbohydrates. Your body prefers fat for fuel when working at lower intensities (50 percent of maximum) or over longer periods.
The less active you are at any given time, the higher the proportion of this fuel mix comes from fat. Working out in a fat-burning zone means that you are keeping the intensity relatively low–so your heart rate is relatively low–which means a greater percentage of calories burned are going to be fat.
The carbohydrates and fats that you burn while exercising means that you are burning calories. Whether these calories are mostly fat or carbohydrates depends in part on how intense and long you work out. Your personal caloric expenditure can vary depending on your bodyweight–the heavier you are, the more calories you burn–and the amount of calories that come from carbs and fat in a single workout can also differ between individuals. It is the total number of calories burned that matters the most to your weight control — it is not if those calories came from carbs or fat.
Ultimately, whether or not you burn carbohydrates or fat as fuel is not crucial to losing weight: burning more calories than you consume, period, is the key. To lose weight, you have to either create an energy deficit, eating fewer calories, or increasing the amount of calories you burn with exercise, or both. One fact that is highly overlooked when it comes to exercising is that, even if you are working out, these additional calories burned are a very small portion of your overall energy expenditure.
It is often said that it is easier to reduce calories than to increase your energy expenditure through exercise. You cannot reduce calories too much if you want to build muscle.
If you are eating enough calories to maintain a BMR, but adding in more training, you are going to create a caloric deficit just from burning more calories. To put it in simple terms, in order to lose 1lb of bodyfat a week, individuals would have to have a caloric deficit of about 500 calories per day. Each pound of fat stores about 3,500 calories, so on average, you would have to burn 500 more calories each day in order to shed one pound each week. The first thing you have to realize is that a pound of fat is made up of roughly 3,500 additional calories.
Once your body has stored the fat, it will not burn off this fat if you just reduce calories. Moving more means that your body needs more energy.a A A If you donat boost your calorie intake, your body starts burning stored energy in fat.
For higher-intensity exercises, like fast-paced running, the body will rely on carbohydrates for fuel more so than fat. When exercising in a cardio zone, you will burn more glycogen, or stored carbohydrates, as the primary source of energy, using less fat, however, your overall burn is far greater. On lower-intensity days, burn fat without losing muscle by really keeping the workout intensity low, and by avoiding carbohydrates, particularly simple carbohydrates. High-intensity workouts produce a lot of increased lactate and so they should be avoided on low-intensity days designed for fat burning. The lower the intensity of your exercise, the higher the percent fat burned.
Other studies found that aerobic exercise could improve muscle mass and reduce abdominal fat, waist size, and body fat (38, 39, 40). In addition to burning, you are burning a few calories through regular everyday activities such as bathing, cleaning, walking, typing, and working out (which uses an additional few calories per day).
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