Re: exercise physiology question
- From: Terje Mathisen <terje.mathisen@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2008 19:08:22 +0100
Jeff and Stephanie Kalember wrote:
Hey all, a question for anyone out there with an exercise physiology background.
My wife has recently embarked on a weight loss/exercise plan at "Curves" here in our home town. The gals running the place tell her to keep her heart rate below 132 beats per minute when exercising or "she'll be burning muscle instead of fat."
Huh????
From what i know of exercise physiology this is not true. When exercising we all burn glycogen stores aerobically (if the heart rate is below 150-160ish) or anaerobically (if the heart rate is very high) or fat (if the heart rate is very low - say approximately below 120ish). There would never be a situation where a normal person exercising in normal heart ranges eating a normal diet would burn MUSCLE as a fuel.
I told her she can get her heart rate up to 140-150-160-170 or anywhere in between and she'll still be burning up fat stores indirectly - NOT muscle. The way i learned it is that we all burn up stored glycogen first and then use food to replace it. If we are calorie deficient for food intake then she uses her fat stores to replace the glycogen...
am I right or am I wrong ??
You are absolutely right, the only way you can burn fat directly, is by doing continuous low/mid-level exercise over very long periods, i.e. like a multi-day Easter xc ski trip across Hardangervidda in Norway.
For people who are used to training multiple times/week, it seems to take several days of strenuous longterm activity to teach the body to use fat directly, I know that in all the years when we did the 4-day xc ski from north to south in Telemark, it was on the third or even fourth day that I got used to that kind of activity, and didn't need to fill up the stores with food&drink every hour or two.
You should suggest something like the Canadian 160 km two-day event as a surefire way to drop a few pounds! (Not so much during the two ski days, as during the previous months/years of skiing needed to get in shape to complete the challenge! :-)
There are other great benefits as well, last year I think someone posted a link here to a Swedish medical research group who have been monitoring all Swedish citizens who had completed Vasaloppet at least once during a ten-year period:
Simply going through the training needed to do this was sufficient to greatly reduce the risk of just not cardiac problems, but also many other deceases, including cancer (and yes, they corrected their numbers for smoking/non-smoking as well.)
.... googling..
Yes, here it is:
"Mortality amongst participants in Vasaloppet: a classical
long-distance ski race in Sweden"
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/pdf/10.1046/j.1365-2796.2003.01122.x?cookieSet=1
This was a study of 49219 men and 24403 women, over ten years of Vasa starts, and they found death risks reduced by 50% for all participants/illnesses, with significant reductions across all major causes of death, even including injuries and poisoning! :-)
With benefits like these, who cares that she'll lose those pounds as well?
Terje
--
- <Terje.Mathisen@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
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