Fatburning zone - does it work

[Rower4001]

If i keep my heart rate above the 'fatburning zone' when doing a workout , will i still be burning fat as effectively ? I want to lose body fat and am constantly doing hard sessions but dont seem to be losing any. I do cardio and weight training 6/7 times a week. cardio 3+ times . Does my heart rate have to be in the fatburning zone to burn fat essentially? I want to be as light and as powerful as possible for rowing

16yr old female . 12 stone 5'9.5

[jamesg]

The more work you do, the more chance you have of burning something, whatever.

NB what you don't put in you don't have to burn out. Three-four ounces of butter, sugar et al is worth about 1000 kCal, which is an awful lot of rowing.

If you do some sums (such as average Watts x Time aboard = Work done) you'll see that by going slower you can go disproportionately longer, so do more work and burn more. You'll also avoid overkill.

Nothing should stop you getting to the boathouse and back by bike either, it's all heat.

What type of boat do you row in? I'd stick to sculls in any case, you don't want to get twisted at your age.

[hjs]

Not really, no matter what, its energy in versus energy out, if you do easy work you burn relative more fat, but harder work will burn more energy overall. Easy work can help in the way that its easier on the body, so you can more work.

But remember, to burn roughly 1kg of fat on the erg you have to erg 7/8 hours at around 2.00 pace.....

Weightloss is 90% eating, not training. Training should be aimed at fitness, if you are overweight you dieet is the problem.

[bisqeet]

you are always going to need energy for doing anything.
newton proved you dont get anything for nothing...

i think yo uare reffering to the often misconstrued - fat burning zone - where the largest percent of fat is "burned" off compared to other zones ?

its true the lower the intensity of excersize - the greater percent of "fat" is used, compared to other intensity zones.
i.e. sleeping is the highest

it has been noted that this can be improved by aerobic training:
aerobic training makes your body an efficient fat-burning machine.
aerobic training raises your metabolism.

[Anth_F]

aerobic training makes your body an efficient fat-burning machine.
aerobic training raises your metabolism.

This, in a nutshell.

[gregsmith01748]

There is a lot of misinformation about fat burning zone. As luck would have it, the repies in this thread are basically free of misinformation and right on point. I'd like to add my two cents.

- When you exercise at low intensity (say below 70% of your maximum heart rate), almost of all of the energy for your muscles comes from metabolizing fat.
- As you increase the intensity of exercise, a number of things happen. First, you increase the amount of energy per minute that is being used (you burn more calories). Second, you begin to metabolize glycogen and glucose to fuel the exercise. Third, the amount of fat you metabolize per minute begins to decrease.
- Eventually, you get to a point where more energy is coming from carbohydrates and less is coming from fat. You will see this referred to sometimes as the crossover point. This is usually around 80% of max heart rate.
- As others have pointed out in this thread, a calorie is just a calorie. Your weight increases if you consume more calories than you use, and goes down if you consume less than you use. It doesn't matter whether or not the calories that you burned came from fat or carbohydrate in terms of long term weight gain or loss.
- One important point though. If you burn a lot of carbohydrates in a session, you may induce a strong feeling of hunger after you workout, compared to if you burnt the same number of calories in the lower "fat burning" zone. If you have trouble with willpower (like I do), it might be easier to control your appetite with a higher proportion of low intensity workouts.

So, it's a bit of a challenge. You burn more calories per hour by working out more intensely, but you also provoke a bigger hunger response with these workouts.

Finally, if you are training to row competitively, you should really be setting up your training to have the right balance of sessions to make you faster, and planning your diet to get the right amount of the right nutrients to get to the right weight. Modifying your training plan to accomplish weight loss goals will likely take away from the intent of making you row faster.

[ArmandoChavezUNC]

aerobic training makes your body an efficient fat-burning machine.

Not many people realize this. There are hundreds, if not thousands of minute biological and chemical changes that occur in your body as a response to exercise. A huge one that is very much overlooked is how efficient your body becomes at utilizing fat as a fuel not only during exercise, but also while you're sedentary. I have some notes on this on my personal computer at home, but endurance athletes' cells undergo transcriptional changes that essentially make them "fat-burning machines" as bisqeet said.

Now, this doesn't mean you won't get gain weight or that you'll magically burn all your fat away, but it does mean that your body becomes so much more efficient at using it than your average sedentary person.

As for the "fat burning zone" - it does exist, insofar as there is an exertion range where your body utilizes mostly fats as fuel for exercise, but as has been pointed out, you burn fewer calories per hour at that exertion range than you do outside of it.

If burning calories is your goal, then shoot for the highest intensity you can hold for the longest duration of time.