To manage your weight, you need exercise strategies that tap into fuel stores and burn extra calories. One of the best strategies to improve your fat-to-lean ratio is to tap into carbohydrate stores early in your workout, forcing your body to draw on fat for fuel. The good news is that carbs are your body's fuel of choice to generate quick energy.
Carbohydrates and Energy Production
During exercise, your muscles rely on adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, manufactured in the muscles to generate energy. ATP is made both anaerobically, or without oxygen from carbohydrates and aerobically, or with oxygen from carbs and fat. Carbohydrate foods are broken down in the digestive tract to glucose and taken up by the muscles and liver in the storage form of glycogen. But the body's storage capacity for glycogen is limited. The longer muscular contraction continues, the more your body strives to spare carbohydrate fuel stores.
Intensity and Fuel Preference
During short bursts of high-intensity exercise, you use glucose anaerobically to make ATP, a process called glycolysis. During glycolysis, one molecule of glucose yields only two units of ATP. If exercise continues at a lower intensity for a duration longer than two minutes, oxygen is used to break down glucose, yielding 36 ATP units from one glucose molecule. During lower-intensity, long-duration activities, glucose stores become depleted and your muscles draw increasingly on fat for aerobic ATP genesis. In short, high-intensity anaerobic exercise utilizes more glucose and burns it more quickly than long-duration aerobic activity.
Resistance Training
Weight training is one of the quickest ways to deplete glycogen stores. Weight training sets that conform to the American College of Sports Medicine guidelines of eight to 12 repetitions at a challenging intensity keep ATP genesis in the anaerobic zone where glycogen is the target fuel. Begin your workout with a brief five- to 10-minute warmup followed by 30 minutes or more of weight training. Save your endurance cardio training for last, and you will go into your fat-burning zone earlier on in your cardio session.
Cardio Intensity Intervals
Another way to make cardio pay off is to intersperse brief anaerobic sprint intervals between longer aerobic segments at your normal pace. For example, if you normally run at 7 mph, hold that pace for three minutes, then increase your speed to 8 or 9 mph for 30 seconds to one minute, then return to your original pace. If you are a walker, brief intervals at a running pace will have the same effect. This principle can be applied to an elliptical machine, stationary bike or other equipment, or can be used to maximize caloric burn during your outdoor cardio workout.
Group Exercise and Sports
High-intensity group exercise classes operate on the same principle as interval training. Classes like Zumba, kickboxing, indoor cycling and Bodypump alternate between aerobic and anaerobic intensities, burning loads of calories from carbohydrates and fat. Sports like basketball, volleyball, gymnastics and tennis follow the same principle of varied intensity, using 70 to 90 percent carbohydrates for fuel. But you only get out of your workout what you put in. Giving an all-out effort will yield the greatest carbohydrate burn.
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