Why Calorie Counting Exercise Machines are a Joke

I want to take this opportunity to clarify a concept that so many have believed to be the opposite for so many years.  Even us fitness professionals have gotten this concept backwards and it has led, in small part, to the obesity epidemic we are currently in today.

Burning calories for effective fat loss has been a hot topic for a very long time.  It has always been thought up until about 10 years ago that effective fat loss exercise programs must include long steady state cardio and marathon weight training sessions of over an hour and a half.  So when it is all said and done, you were in a gym training for 2-3 hours a day.  Unfortunately with that practice, we as a society got fatter and fatter, so obviously something was amiss.

Over the last ten years fat loss training has changed dramatically due to the realization that fat isn’t burned during the training session, rather it is burned during the recovery or once the training session is completed.  And that calorie burn from one training session, depending upon the intensity and other factors, will be elevated for 24-36 hours after the workout.  Kind of makes calorie counters on cardio machines pretty useless.

Within your workout there is very little to no fat burning going on.  Your body and muscles are being broken down during training and carbohydrates are being burned off so that you can sustain energy within your workout.  Without getting into too much science when your body uses a lot of oxygen, it uses more energy.  When your body alternates between using a lot of oxygen and recovering for a short time, it uses more oxygen because the body struggles to get used to the alternating high and low intensity.  After a workout in this format is when you get the elevated calorie burn during recovery for 24-36 hours.

And total time is the least important factor in your program.  You can train for 20-30 minutes and get a tremendous fat burning effect because your intensity is higher and your workout is condensed and in turn more effective.  Rather than think time, think economy.  Find a few exercises where you train as many muscle groups effectively at once and safely.  Often the best way to start training like this is to use body weight exercises that allow you to modify easily to fit your abilities.

When training to burn fat live by these few rules to get killer results: you can’t measure the amount of calories burned because the calories that really count will be burned after your workout during your recovery.  Maximize use of your time by using exercises that train several muscle groups at once.  Trim down your rest time within your workout in order to condense your workout in a shorter amount of time allowing you to complete more in less time and produce a huge need for oxygen in the body which results in a much elevated amount of calories burned during recovery.  And lastly alternate your high intensity with short recovery bursts to cause the body to keep ‘guessing’ during recovery and prolong the recovery process.  This causes elevated calories to be burned for a longer period of time.