Easy Guide to Fitness: Part 3

Workout intensity will determine if you will burn the calories in your stomach from the food you just ate, or if you will burn the calories that are stored in your body as fat. It's not necessarily where you burn the calories, but instead the efficiency of the process of burning your calories that matters.

High intensity actions will burn carbohydrates while low intensity actions will burn fat. The reason for this is because carbohydrates are ready to use energy and high intensity workouts require a lot of energy immediately. Fat is energy (calories) that has been converted into fat as storage and it must be reconverted to energy in order to be used again. The fat to energy conversion process takes time and low intensity workouts do not have high-energy demands and can wait for fat to be converted into energy.

How do you use this information?

People hear that they can specifically burn fat so they figure low intensity workouts are a smarter way to exercise. This is actually not the case. High intensity workouts burn more energy per second than low intensity workouts so you can burn more calories in 30 minutes with a high intensity workout than you could in 30 minutes with a low intensity workout. If you are only burning the calories you have stored as fat what do you think is going to happen to the calories sitting in your stomach? Those unused calories will be stored as fat. So, this means that you could choose to either burn 100 calories of stored fat with a low intensity workout and have 300 unused calories in your stomach to be stored as fat later, or you can burn the 300 calories in your stomach and let your body burn the stored fat on the important involuntary functions (breathing, digestion, thinking, cellular repair, etc). This process is metabolism.

Metabolism is the amount of calories your body burns performing involuntary maintenance functions. Maintaining muscle tissue is considered maintenance. Calories are required to maintain muscles, so the larger your muscles are the more calories your body will burn on its own. You should focus on burning the calories in your stomach so you are not adding to your body's fat storage and let your body's metabolism burn the fat covering your muscles.

A higher intensity workout does burn more calories per second but working out at too high of an intensity will cause your body to fatigue much quicker and will limit your workout time.