I’ve been cycling a lot and I always end up in Zone 3 or 4. People say Zone 2 is the best and the “fat burning” Zone.
Does this mean I’ll lose more fat/weight in the same amount of time exercising if my hear rate is lower than it has been!?
In: 8
Some of this will be slightly wrong, but this is ELI5 so:
The body has two different types of fuel available, *fat* and *carbs*.
Fat has very efficient storage, it can store a lot of energy in a relatively small volume. It’s slow though, since it’s so efficiently stored, it takes a while to “unpack” it before the energy can be used.
Carbs on the other hand take up a lot of space, and stores a relatively small amount of energy. But this energy can be utilized very quickly, and is ready to go whenever.
At rest we get almost 100% of the energy we need from fat, like I said it’s not fast, but it’s fast enough. A “cardio zone” is basically just a ratio between fat and carb usage, since as we increase the workload, we need to access our stored energy faster, and fat alone isn’t fast enough to keep up.
Why do we care about this? Most of us shouldn’t really, because it doesn’t matter. Our bodies will spend the hours/days after a workout returning to status quo, so it doesn’t matter if you spent 90/10 or 30/70 fat/carbs *during* the workout, all your body will remember afterwards is how much energy was used in total.
I said most of us, some people do have to care. If you’re competing in some sport, you might want to spend as much carbs as possible (because more carbs = faster energy = better performance), but you don’t want to “run out”, because being left with nothing but fat at the end of a race is not a winning strategy.
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