Timing is Everything: When does Fat Loss Actually Happen

There is such a misconception about this topic I thought I’d write about it again to get my point across and to share the facts rather than theory.  Ancient thinking (by ancient I mean circa 1980’s early 90’s) had and sadly for some, still has its place in minds that in order to lose fat you must perform cardio exercise for a long, slow, steady duration.  The reasoning was that you must be exercising in order to lose fat and you wanted to maintain exercise for a long period of time so you could burn fat longer during your workout.  And that was the best way to burn fat.

Well, there are several things wrong with that theory.  For one, very few, if any people in reality have time to perform hours of exercise and there are many busy and fit people in the world.  Second, training for such a long time will break down our bodies, and injury will happen, its only a matter of time.  And third, there is a better way to burn fat that is 9 times more effective, which is interval training and metabolic circuits.

These two methods practice exactly what I want to talk about today; when fat loss or burn actually happens.  And its not during your workout, its after.  During your workout you burn instant energy such as carbohydrates that are stored in your body.  The more carbohydrate storage you have, the harder it is to burn fat post workout (that’s dependent upon your carbohydrate intake from the previous day or two), so your nutrition must be a focus which means reducing the complex carbs to a bare minimum and increasing your fibrous fruits and veggies.  If you have a low carbohydrate storage in your body, you will burn fat faster post workout then if you don’t.

If we look at your post workout, or your recovery time, that is when your body works to get back to a calm state.  The more disrupted your exercise, the more time it takes for your body to recover to a calm state and that means elevated calorie burn while that is happening.  We want to prolong that event as long as possible and exercise is one component of that.  The other is your nutrition.  If you eat junk just because you workout, you aren’t going to get anywhere and probably should find something else to do with your time because you aren’t going to get great results.

Let me map it out for you a little better for those who may still follow the calories burned on cardio machines.  I’ll do a comparison.  Person A trains for an hour on a treadmill and burns 700 calories and during recovery which is about a half hour to an hour, they burn another 150 (generous number by the way).  So all together they burned 850 calories and they were training only for an hour.  Person B does intervals on the treadmill for 15-20 minutes (30 second high intensity 60 second recovery) and burns 250 calories.  Now recovery, depending on the intensity and nutrition, will last for 24-36 hours and during that time will burn 9 times the calories expended during the workout.  So person B will burn 2250 calories just from one workout, and has finished workout, showered, drove home and is probably spending some free time doing something he/she enjoys all in the time it took Person A to workout.  Again, this is not a dream or something I made up, this is study and science proven fact. 

Throw time and calories burned during your workout out the window and focus on the principles of intensity and quality rather than quantity.