Staying in my fat burning zone

[TJ]

Hi Cathe,

I have been using your workout tapes for many years and really love them. But I do have a question. I am starting a new weight loss program. I still have 20 pounds to lose and with this new program they are saying that in order to be in "the fat burning zone", you need to be at 65% of your target heart rate. If you are any higher than you are not burning fat, but sugar. What do you say about this. I know that when I do your workouts I am definetly higher than 65%. I am usually 75 - 85% of my target heart rate. I have not been doing your tapes for the last 3 weeks and have been going outside doing fast walking or slow jogging, but miss the workouts a lot. So today I pluged in Step Blast. I had to really make adjustments to keep my heart rate at 70%. Is this true? I would really like your profesional opinion.

Thank you so much for your reply and thank you for all the awesome workouts. I got all of the Hardcore Extreme series and love them. I was really surprised at how hard the band work really was.

Theresa

 

[materialsgirl]

Theresa,

I'm not Cathe, but I do have a good article for you to read on this subject:

http://exercise.about.com/cs/cardioworkouts/l/aa022601a.htm

There is really no reason for you to keep your heart rate that low if. You will burn more total fat, and way more calories, even though the percentage of calories from fat is lower. The "fat burning zone" is really kind of a myth - you do burn a higher percentage of fat in this zone, but you have to work out a LOT longer to burn the same amount of fat as you would at a higher heart rate. So go ahead, kick it up a notch!

 

[CurlyQ]

I hope you don't mind but I'm going to chime in...

Ditto to Emily's post.

I'm getting my degree in Exercise science and we did treadmill testing for this very topic and came up with similar numbers that the article had only the calories doubled from 65% to 85% HR max. Simply put, you need to be in a calorie deficit to loose weight, it doesn't matter where it comes from (unless you were burning protein ,aka muscle, which would only happen if you were doing an all day event all out, or on a diet like Atkins).

A heartrate monitor can only estimate loosely what your calorie burn is since calorie expenditure is based mostly on your respiratory rate (RQ value), which can only be measured in a lab.

I'm curious, what is the program that you're doing?