Active Lifestyle - Overview

• Fat is burned in muscle cells.

• The more lean muscle mass you have the more efficient you will be at burning fat and ultimately losing weight

• Anaerobic exercise builds muscle.

• Aerobic exercise burns fat.

• Target Heart Zone and Interval Training are two keys to an active lifestyle.

Muscle

People NOT familiar with resistance training will argue that they don’t want to build any muscle because they don’t want to look too ‘bulky” or don’t like going to the gym.  Instead people say “I just want to lose weight and ‘get toned’.  The misconception is that the word ‘tone’ comes from ‘muscle tone’.  There are exercises and other forms of activity that will challenge your muscles and provide a cardiovascular workout, while maintaining a slender, lean appearance.   

Muscle is important for this simple FACT - fat is burned in muscle cells.  SO, if you want to lose weight and ‘tone up’, you will need to be concerned with developing and maintaining muscle.  Typically lifting weights is an Anaerobic activity…which means that you will burn the available fuels in your muscle cells and then look for the next available supply of fuels =  glucose.  THEREFORE, simply lifting weights WILL NOT burn FAT as fuel during exercise.  So why is developing and maintaining muscle important? Because MUSCLE = the furnace in which fat cells are burned.  The healthier your muscles (furnace) the more efficiently fat will be burned during AEROBIC activity. 

4 Key Facts to losing weight properly:

• Aerobic exercise burns fat, Anaerobic exercise develops muscle.

• Fat is burned inside the muscle cells.  If you want to burn fat, or “get toned” you must be concerned with developing and maintaining muscle.

• In order to build muscle you must challenge them and then support the repair and growth nutritionally.

• The more muscle you have on your bones, the faster your metabolism will be and the more efficient your body will be at losing weight.

Aerobic vs Anaerobic

There is a common misconception that all exercise is aerobic.  Aerobic exercise is defined as involving or improving oxygen consumption in the body.  This simply means that the heart is working to get oxygen and nutrients out to the muscles.  Why is oxygen so important?  When you exercise within your Target Heart Zone, oxygen is delivered to cells during aerobic exercise, the oxygen helps ignite or burn the fat.  Without oxygen, the fat will not be burned and will not result in a drop of body fat.  Aerobic exercise will help strengthen your cardiovascular system (heart and lungs) and allow for better circulation, reduce the risk of heart disease and increase energy and endurance. 

BE CAREFUL – too much aerobic activity and not enough nutrition can have adverse affects on your fat burning quest.  Let me see if I can explain this without too much confusion.  If you exercise aerobically beyond your bodies ability and/or willingness to supply fat and stored sugar (glycogen) as fuel, your body will start to cannibalize muscle to use as fuel.  Your body can convert the amino acids (muscle protein) in to sugar and use this newly created sugar as the source of fuel for the aerobic activity.

Think about this, too often, people think they can run longer or do the stair-master faster and think ‘if I cut back on calories and carbs, I will be burning more fat.”  This is WRONG,WRONG, WRONG.  Again, if you follow this ‘logic’ and you notice a loss in  weight, most likely that weight loss is predominantly from muscle.  NOW, you have not only INCREASED your body's percentage of fat, but you have decreased your body’s ability to burn fat.   

Proper intensity (THZ) and interval training is the key to aerobic exercise. Try to exercise aerobically at least 3 times per week for 30 minutes per workout.  Try not to exceed 5 times per week at 45 minutes per workout.

THZ

Aerobic intensity is measured by the number of time your heart beats per minute during exercise.  The key to aerobic exercise is Target Heart Zone (THZ).  This is a way to measure your aerobic activity so you know if you are getting any fat burning results out of your workout.

To ensure aerobic benefit from your workout, you should exercise at 60% to 80% of your Age Predicted Estimated Maximum Heart Rate which is known as Target Heart Zone (THZ).  

Here’s how to figure your THZ:

For example, if I am 30 years old my THZ would be calculated like this:

So I know that when exercising aerobically, I should aim for a THZ between 114 beats per minute and 152 beats per minute.

Interval Training

Interval training includes aerobic and anaerobic activity every week.  There are many methods and approaches to interval training and if you ask 20 fitness trainers for advice, you most likely will get 20 completely different answers. 

The keys to interval training is getting a good combination of resistance training and cardiovascular training, every week.  The resistance training will develop and maintain your muscles which are needed to burn fat.  The cardiovascular training will burn the fat as along as you are hitting your THZ.