You’ve probably seen dozens of articles that talk about staying in your fat burning zone and how to burn more fat while exercising at a certain heart rate. You may have even seen one of those charts showing you where your “target heart rate fat burning zone” is …
Well, I can tell you from experience and first-hand research that following that advice is one of the SLOWEST ways to burn body fat.
This is why:
Those old-school charts mislead people into thinking they’re only burning fat while exercising in that zone, but that’s just not true. Although you are certainly burning a higher percentage of fat, you are still using other forms of energy and fuel to keep your body moving.
But that’s not the biggest myth of all …
The worst part about trying to stay in this fat burning zone is that you have to keep your intensity so low that the total calories burned is pretty negligible if you are looking to lose weight.
What that means is that if you stay in this “zone” and stay at a lower intensity, you will undoubtedly burn a higher percentage of fat, but your total expenditure may only be 100 calories in 20 minutes. Continuing with this example, about 75 of those calories can come from fat.
Now let’s see the kind of short, high-intensity workouts I recommend to my clients for fast results.
In the same 20 minutes you will burn 200 calories (twice as much as in the slowest form) and about 125 calories (about 62%) will come from fat. So you’re not just burning more total calories, more of it comes from fat!
How do you do this?
Throw away the 10-year-old Fat Burning Zone articles and charts and start interval training. That means getting your heart rate racing for 20 to 90 seconds and then allowing yourself to recover before repeating.
The benefit of this type of training is that you not only burn more calories, fat, and tone your entire body, but you also keep your metabolism high and burn fat for up to 31 hours!
That means you can say goodbye to long, slow, boring cardio workouts and start giving your results a boost with the type of proven interval-based training I’ve been recommending for years.
It’s faster and you will get at least twice the results.
