Fat loss is all about caloric expenditure. You must burn off more calories than you consume in order to lose body fat. Long term, however, there is more to a successful fitness and wellness regimen than the reading on your fitness monitor. Achieving overall health and well-being involves integrating these aspects into your daily fitness and wellness plan.
Optimizing caloric expenditure is not aerobic training, which will burn calories only while you are doing it. It is anaerobic training, which burns calories while you are working out and increases the calories burned for hours afterwards.
During anaerobic exercise, the body burns a lot of calories. The metabolism still remains elevated following a workout. This is known as excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC). Recovery of the metabolic rate back to pre-exercise levels can require several minutes for light to moderate aerobic training such as MOXIE Barre, several hours for moderate to high intensity anaerobic cardio exercise such as MOXIE Ride), and even up to 12 hours or longer for prolonged, exhaustive interval and circuit weight training exercise like MOXIE Ride and MOXIE Fusion.
It was once believed steady state cardio was superior for fat loss because relatively more fat is used by the body as fuel at lower exercise intensities than at higher intensities. The “fat burning zone” shown on most cardio equipment as only 60%-65% of maximum heart rate is not the most optimal intensity for burning fat. Yes, you burn more fat relative to glycogen when going for a walk, but what we care about is total fat burn. At higher intensities, you are burning far more fat, even though the fat/glycogen ratio is lower. In addition, interval training allows you to exercise at very high intensities for a much longer period of time than steady state, so you burn more fat. You increase your metabolism and burn more calories for up to 24 hours after interval training, whereas going for a jog has a lower after burn (EPOC) effect.
Interval Training is a better way of performing cardio workouts to prevent adaptations and rapidly improve fat loss results. You experience the benefits of interval training during MOXIE Fusion and MOXIE Ride.
Interval training refers to a series of intense activity separated by short rest periods. Utilizing interval training will eventually enable you to exercise at a higher overall intensity without getting as tired. This occurs because you alternate periods of high intensity exercise with periods of lower intensity, allowing you to do more work in the same time period than you could before.
The benefits of interval training lie in the fact that as you improve, the work intervals can be made increasingly harder, recovery intervals can be shortened or training can be performed at a higher speed. For example, the rest periods during MOXIE Fusion were once 45-seconds and now are 30-seconds. For busy people, interval training and circuit training workouts are substantially more efficient to help you burn far more calories in much less time, and burn more fat in the process.
Putting it All Together: Achieving Overall Health and Well-Being
Lower intensity exercise like MOXIE Barre certainly has its place within an exercise regimen, relying on exercise in the fat burning zone to burn fat is not an efficient approach. Lower intensity exercise fine-tunes the body. It also strengthens the mind-body connection and develops body awareness. According to Greatist expert Stokes, if you’re doing a lot of strength training and spinning, it’s a good idea to incorporate the high-reps, bodyweight-only exercises of a barre class once a week.
In the context of a fat loss program, exercise helps you keep your muscle, stay fit, make modest increases to your metabolism, and burn some fat. It’s a scientific fact that you must eat less calories than you burn to lose fat, nutrition has a much more powerful impact on this equation and consequently, it should be your main focus.
Calorie Intake: Quantity and Quality Count by Carrie Montgomery, R.D.
“It’s just a matter of calories in, calories out.” How many times have you heard that said? It’s not exactly that easy.
Many times we view calories as the culprit, however calories are the source of nutrition. Calories from good nutrition assist with disease prevention, physical development and anti-aging.
The question is “what the quality of your calories?” Highly processed foods can undermine your metabolism and drive us to overeat. Excessive calories from processed foods can leave us sluggish, tired, and unsatisfied. The same amount of calories from whole foods has a huge difference in the way they affect your appetite, energy level, and long-term health.
The quantity of calories you take in is important, but the quality of calories has a significant impact. To read more about the type of calories people take in and the direct impact on the amount of energy expended follow this link to Web MD.
Read more about your target heart rate for a more efficient workout.
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