Author: D C

I keep coming across wrong thinking about the fat burning zone in multiple areas so someone upstairs must be telling me something. Thank goodness that better info sources like NASM are out there. These better sources are like a ligthhouse on a stormy night — they help you navigate your way through all the ignorance.

So here’s the incorrect idea: because the aerobic pathway (think long slow distance exercise) uses primarily fat as fuel, then people should only do that kind of exercise to burn fat. The usual recommendation is to keep your heart rate really low like around 50-65% of your maximum heart rate and if you can still hold a conversation then you’re at the right level. If not, you need to back off. Exercising above that rate kicks you out of the fat burning zone into a zone that gets more anaerobic as it goes higher — you know, one that requires you to sweat and actually make an effort and goodness knows we can’t have that.

This is what it looks like:
The “maximum cardio benefit zone” above is the area where you’re burning less fat and more carb, which is what people want to avoid.

Now before I go any further, let’s point out something: if I can talk comfortably while exercising then I’m not exercising very hard, right? Which means I’m not burning many calories, right? This will become important later on.

So let’s look at a breakdown of how many calories from carbs or fat you’re burning while exercising in the different heart ranges: (Source: Indoor Rowing Training Guide, Version 2)
There is a sliding scale from 100% fat, which is being burned at the very low end of exertion off the chart above, all the way up to 100% carbs which are being burned at the top of the exertion chart in the anaerobic zone. At the one end you can think of walking or slow jogging and at the other end imagine full out sprinting. All the ranges in between show a split of fat and carbs being burned with the percentage of fat going down and the percentage of carbs being burned going up as the exertion increases.

So let’s take an individual who walks for about 20:00 on a treadmill at about a 3mph rate and that puts him at around 60% of his maximum heart rate, which is what the “fat burning zone” idea recommends. He’s burning around 4.8 calories a minute for a total of 96 calories in that 20:00. About 67% of those calories are from fat so that would be 64 calories of fat burned and 33% are from carbs, making that 32 calories from carbs burned. Since the percentage of fat is higher than the percentage of carbs, this looks like he’s burning crazy fat.

But let’s put this guy back on the treadmill and have him move twice as fast at around 6mph. He’s now burning around 9.75 calories a minute for a total of 194 calories and 54% of those are coming from carbs and only 46% are coming from fat. So the percentage of fat burned is lower, making this seem like a worse option than the fat burning zone.

Not so fast!

While the percentage of fat burned is lower, let’s look at the numbers: 54% of 194 is 104 calories from carbs and 46% of 194 is 90 calories from fat. So working out in the fat burning zone for 20:00 got us 64 calories of fat burned and working out above that burned 90 calories of fat — nearly 50% more fat calories burned!!

To top it all off, he burned twice as many calories as he did in the fat burning zone, which will help him lose fat faster. A workout in the fat burning zone would have to be twice as long to get this caloric expenditure. How’s that fat burning zone stuff sounding now?

An obvious objection to this is that most people can’t work at a higher pace every day, with the implication that they’d be better off working out at a lower rate every day than doing a harder workout 3x a week. From experience I can tell you that if people can work out 3x a week or 6x a week, they’re more likely to actually make 3x a week because of their busy schedules. And there’s always the option of working harder 3x a week and doing 2-3 recovery workouts at a lower heart rate each week. This last option maximizes your fat loss and is the most productive use of your time.

So the bottom line is, in general, ditch the idea of a fat burning zone and learn to work at higher intensities. You’ll burn even more fat and who doesn’t like that?

One of the things that makes Formosa Fitness special is our use of Personal Record and Goal boards and the challenge board that we have. The challenge board is a group of challenges that we feel could help you get to the next level if you undertake them. The problem is, few people seem to understand how to use the challenges and the board.

Some fitness styles treat every workout as a challenge and IMO that’s a disaster waiting to happen. You aren’t physically capable of doing that every time, despite what some people would have you believe. And the mentality that that method promotes is detrimental to long term progress. It turns every workout, regardless of how you feel that day, into a competition and leaves no room to slow down and develop skills. Not a good thing.

The challenges exist as a way of training — you pick a challenge or at most two at a time and make beating your time or reps in that challenge part of your training.

The challenges allow you to test your training over time and keep you focused on a goal. Are your reps going up and your time going down? If yes, then you’re doing something right. If not, then you need to go back and look at your exercise form, your recovery methods, your programming, supporting exercises, your diet, etc.

Instead, what I see are people that try a challenge once, get a random, meaningless time or rep number, they say “that was swell” and write a number on the board and never look at it again. That is NOT the point of the challenges!!!

Challenges aren’t a new, shiny thing that are meant to provide distraction from our regular training, but that seems to be how people are using them. The challenges are meant to give purpose and focus to the training. It’s about challenging yourself!

So let’s take a look at how to do an actual challenge and train for it. Above is Martin Rooney’s Training for Warriors Challenge 4. The challenge consists of four 1:00 rounds of max pushups, max pullups, max special situps (watch the video), and max dips. You take :15 rest in between the exercises and count up all your reps at the end. That total is your score and you try to beat it.

So how would you use this challenge to train yourself?

First of all, can you do all the exercises? If not, then that’s the first challenge: learn to do all the exercises. Nothing is worse than someone that wants to “do a challenge” but insists on dumbing down all the exercises. If you are far away from doing them, then pick a lower challenge. Don’t let ego tell you it’s okay to substitute suspension trainer rows for real pullups and that your number then is equal to those that did real pullups. It isn’t and you’re pretending to be something that you aren’t. So don’t dumb down a challenge, rise to it!

Second, if you can do all the exercises but the volume is way beyond what you think you can do now, then work slowly on increasing that volume through sets first. In the challenge above, I might be able to do 10 pushups but this challenge calls for 1:00 of them. Again, honor the challenge by respecting it. If you can only do 10 then you aren’t any where near doing them for a full minute, let alone followed by 3 other exercises for max reps. Work those pushups in sets of ten, or in pyramids, etc. to build up your reps first. Do these for each of the exercises.

Third, when you’re in reasonable shape to take the challenge then do it! Take the challenge for the first time as a test. Now you’ve done it. Write your name and number on the board and never look at it again. WRONG! How did you do? What exercises were harder? Where is your weakness? Did the challenge just make you it’s little bitch? Then we have some work to do, don’t we?

So the challenge exposed our weaknesses and we know what to work on. Go to it! Pullups not what you thought they were? Let’s increase pullups to at least 3x a week. Situps slowed you down? Haven’t been working the core, have we? Maybe saving core work for the end isn’t doing us any good. Time to make it a priority. Can you do all the exercises well individually but gas out when they’re put together? Then your metabolic conditioning needs work. So we’ll just do the test every workout, right? WRONG!

We’ll start by pairing a couple of the exercises into a superset and do them one after another. That will get us used to the metabolic demands. We could pair :30 of pushups with :30 of pullups, take a break and do that 3x. Then :30 of situps followed by :30 of dips, rest, and again x3. There’s a lot of ways to train for this. But here’s the key: we train up for this challenge.

After we train for a while, we’ll take the challenge as a test again, and repeat the process. The challenge trains us as we rise to meet it.

In the meantime, we compare our efforts to others taking the challenge. By doing this, we motivate and support others. Iron sharpens iron. Tinfoil doesn’t sharpen anything.

So treat a challenge with respect! It shows you the flaws in your training and will teach you how to correct errors in your training. But if you use it as just some random throw away “what workout are we going to do today?” kind of thing, then it’s meaningless. Rise to the challenge!

I’ve learned the hard way not to always trust fast results. I get it: you want everything and you want it NOW. I’ve felt that pressure the entire time I’ve been a trainer. I’ve always known that I have about two weeks for someone to start seeing some results and that’s really difficult for some folks that have many bodily issues and an entire lifetime of zero activity behind them. Rome wasn’t built in a day and that’s incredibly unpopular in our day and age.

So I designed my programs in the beginning to get the fastest results I knew how to get. And luckily, they worked. That was sometimes a bad thing. One example: I had a woman come to me with a significant “muffin top” who obviously wanted to lose fat. I put her on my fat loss program and she lost a significant amount of fat in a very short time. Because of the way she dressed, everyone notice the obvious fat loss and I must have picked up a good 5-6 extra clients from that one success alone.
Here’s the catch: it didn’t last.

This client was very happy with the obvious results but we had gotten them so quickly that the habit of fitness and nutrition had not set in. So she stopped coming regularly then stopped coming at all and gained all the fat back and then some. She tried to restart the process again later but the effort wasn’t there so no results.

The main problem was that fast results left her without the need to make serious, long-term changes. She got what she wanted but easy come, easy go. And they went. I often wished I had not gotten her such fast results, as weird as that must sound, because in the long run it didn’t work well for her. But what is a personal trainer supposed to do? If you tell people that they need to work hard over a long period of time, you will lose them to infomercials and the quick-fix fitness gurus. My trick of using fast results to sell them on the methods so they’ll stick with it long term didn’t always work.

So when you’re eyeing P90X, Insanity, or whatever quick-fix fitness program is out now, think of whether or not you’re in it for the long haul or are you looking to get a quick fix that will disappear as easily as it came. Might your money not be spent better elsewhere?
Food for thought.

Here’s a great explanation about how to breath into a weightlifting belt. Thing is, this works very well WITHOUT a belt and should be done to stabilize the lower body and spine any time you lift anything. In martial arts, this is known as “kidney breathing” since the idea is to learn how to breath with/into the kidney area, something many people think is impossible but here it is. The health benefits of this are well known in certain circles and wearing a belt is a great way to train this kind of breathing since you normally need something to push against in order to train this feeling of expansion.

Yet another connection between martial arts and fitness, for anyone that cares to look.

Have you bought the Four Hour Body in Chinese yet? If you or someone you know has, then come to our FREE two-hour seminar to learn how to get in shape using the methods in the book. At Formosa Fitness on Saturdays from 10am-12pm, you’ll learn how to swing the kettlebell for fat loss, how to deadlift for strength and fitness, and how to use the slow carb diet to cut your body fat! All seminars will be hands on so you’ll actually learn how to do the techniques described in the book! Call us at 2365-5223 and reserve a spot today!

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People who have bought the book in English are also welcome to attend. The seminars are in English and Chinese!