I’ve been working out for about 4 months now (HIIT on a spin bike and a bit of weightlifting ~20 mins.) three times a week. I’m seeing good improvement in health and physique despite having no idea what I’m doing.
My motivator was calories, but now when I work out I burn way less calories because my body is getting used to the stress, I think. What’s happening? Is my workout less useful than before? Can I not eat as much or is my body burning more fuel now?
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Our bodies compensate for the calories burned during workouts by expending fewer calories throughout the remainder of the day
If your goal is fat loss, you may see some benefit to mixing in some longer sessions at lower intensity. Like hiking or cycling.
Your body is likely adapting quickly to the intense challenges you are putting it through, especially if you are a beginner.
There’s a fitness saying, “You can’t outrun a bad diet.” The simple fact is, if exercise were less efficient than eating, then carnivores wouldn’t exist.
It’s actually your body becoming more efficient. A key to avoiding that is constant shocks to your system. Change it up – not just the exercises, but the workouts too. Do full weights for a few weeks.
Well, poor writing aside (your motivator was calories? What’s that even mean?) I’ll try to glisten your meaning.
Sounds like your workout has become easier and either your weight loss has slowed or you’re seeing less visual changes. You’re probably burning about the same amount of calories, maybe a little less if you’ve lost some weight.
If you want to continue to see improvements, you have to work harder.
A healthy diet is important, but no amount of dieting will get you ripped. For that you need to exercise, often and vigorously, and you will need to continue to push yourself.
Dieting will increase the speed of fat loss, but without proper protein intake you won’t build muscle (the hard part, losing fat is easy), and without enough nutrients and calories you will be low energy and will have trouble exercising as often, which will slow muscle growth and fat loss.
So, eat your salads and lean meats and beans. Exercise more.
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If you feel that you’re not burning as many calories now as you did before the main reason for that would be because you’ve reached what the body considers a sufficient amount of muscle mass. It’s really expensive to build up muscle mass (something like 6000 kcal per kilo of muscle mass), so that really helps you burn calories when starting out (about two days worth of food per month if you’re training in an optimal way).
The extra energy demand from increased muscle mass is nowhere near that, so if you’ve reached a point where you’re no longer putting on muscle mass as effectively your caloric need will drop somewhat. Losing weight also means you’re not constantly carrying that weight, which also decreases the amount of work your body is doing.
You might need to reduce caloric intake, you might need to shift caloric intake from carbs to protein (you need about 2 grams of protein per day per kilo of bodymass when trying to gain muscle mass) or you might need to lift heavier (but be careful because you need to ramp up weight slowly. Muscles adjust quickly, but tendons and joints tend to lag behind a few months).
Also. You need to weightlift in a way that engages your core and major musclegroups. A common beginners mistake is to focus on chest and biceps, while generally it’s far more important to engage core and leg muscles.
>now when I work out I burn way less calories because my body is getting used to the stress, I think.
Why do you think you’re burning less calories? It’s very likely that you’re not actually burning significantly less.
It’s very difficult to track calorie burn directly, so to answer your underlying question, we’d have to look at what you mean by “burning less calories”.
If you mean “the workout feels easier”, that doesn’t relate to calorie burn; that’s just your general fitness. As your heart, lungs, muscles and nerves get more used to the workouts, you’ll feel less fatigue even for the same (or more!) calories burned.
If you mean “the exercise bike shows a lower calorie burn”, I advise you to ignore that. Calorie tracking for exercise machines is notoriously inaccurate.
If you mean “I’ve lost weight so it takes fewer calories to move the body” – yes, a lighter body takes somewhat fewer calories to move; but it’s not a huge effect, and at the same time, muscle takes more calorie maintenance than fat. So it’s unlikely that you’d be seeing a big effect after 4 months.
Short version: You probably want to talk to a doctor, physical therapist, or personal trainer. These things are complicated.
Longer version: every cell burns calories just sitting there. Fat cells barely any, muscles burn quite a bit. So if you add muscle you burn calories sitting still.
How are you measuring calories burned? I don’t know of a good way to do this. There are bad ways, so you perhaps you are being mislead by your metrics. Specifically, if you are doing the workout consistently, you feel better, and you look better, what is the problem?
If you haven’t improved your diet, you probably need to do that.
You might want to do more different things to challenge your body. Doing the same thing can become less demanding as your body gets good at it, so to speak.
>My motivator was calories, but now when I work out I burn way less calories because my body is getting used to the stress, I think. What’s happening? Is my workout less useful than before? Can I not eat as much or is my body burning more fuel now?
This doesn’t make sense. How do you know how many calories you burn? If you mean from the bike, it’s only an estimate. If you want to know how they calculate that, [here you go.](https://www.verywellfit.com/are-calorie-counters-on-treadmills-accurate-2911975)
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