Here is the link to an interesting article in today's Austin American Statesman.  http://www.statesman.com/search/content/life/stories/other/2009/09/21/0921peter.html Here is my take on that: Do you remember when the big hype was to work out in a specific zone based on your target heart rate? Today you can go to any gym and find a chart on almost all of the cardio equipment. It has fat zones and cardio zones associated with age and heart rates.

What is all that about? Well, we are told to work out in the fat burning zone if you are trying to lose weight, and the cardio zone if you are trying to get cardio gains. You could even, and still, buy heart rate monitors that strap to your chest or wrist like a watch, or even now as a ring. The truth of the matter is yes, if you stay within your "fat burning zone", you will burn calories from fat only. 

Time for a case study: Lets say you are in your "zone" and briskly walking so as not to go above your target heart rate. It takes you 1 hour to walk 3 miles. (20 minute mile pace). Now lets say you ignore your target heart rate and run. You run as hard as you can, for the same hour. If you are a good runner, you might be able to run 10 or more miles. You can expect about 40 to 60% of the calories being burned coming from fat.  When you were running, did you not burn calories? Where were those calories from?

So let's do a little basic math: First, 1 mile is about 100 calories. (Varies on your weight, but we will call it 100 calories) That's 100 calories walking, running, skipping, whatever. So if you were in your zone, you burned about 300 calories in an hour, from fat. When you ran, you burned about 1000 calories. (2500 more and that's a pound!!) It would take you almost 12 hours of walking to lose a pound, and only 3.5 while running. Who has time for that???

If losing weight was easy, we would not have an obesity epidemic in America. It will take some work, but it will be well worth it.

Randy

www.bringfitnessback.com