The Best Way to Lose Fat | The Science of the Fat Burning Zone

all of us have probably thought about losing fat at some point and maybe you're even thinking about it now with the new year Upon Us you're thinking of joining the hordes of other sweaty people as they pack into the gyms this January with the common Quest or New Year's resolution to burn fat or lose weight but there's a lot of confusion when it comes to burning fat and frankly a lot of myths so in today's video we're going to talk about the most effective ways of burning fat and this is going to be based on physiology as well as the data we'll also have some discussions around the confusion and myths with the fat burning zones as well as address can you actually Target certain areas of the body to pull fat from based on exercise choice it's gonna be a fun and interesting one and maybe even a little bit controversial so let's jump right into this anatomical awesomeness [Music] so a few quick key points when it comes to fat fat is often referred to as adipose tissue so I'm going to use those terms interchangeably and adipose tissue is found in various places throughout the body some of the main places are deep to the skin or this third layer down that is called the hypodermis or the subcutaneous layer it's found surrounding organs within the liver and even some fat can be stored in skeletal muscles but the area that we're typically the most concerned when it comes to where fat is is that hypodermis because that's superficial or on top of the muscle and generally we like our muscles to be able to shine through so the idea is if that hypodermis or that adipose tissue is a little bit thinner it's going to be easier to see a Rippling biceps or a Rippling rectus abdominis muscle and just to be clear the street term for rectus abdominis is the six-pack muscle and you are in luck because all of us have one of those it's just whether or not a hypodermis or that adipose is thin enough for us to see it so let's Now cover this idea of is there an actual fat burning Zone that we should get into and is there an ideal or best type of exercise that gets us there and for us to best understand that we do need to talk about the energy sources that are working or exercising skeletal muscles will utilize and that primarily is either carbohydrates or fats I say primarily because there are certain cases where we can use proteins for energy but the studies in the data we're really going to hone into focused on this ratio of carbohydrates to fats being burned during different types or intensities of exercise so for example we're going to see that somebody doing some form of exercise or a certain intensity they might be burning 70 fats and only 30 carbs at that type of exercise then we might flip-flop it to another intensity and we might see that changes to 80 percent carbs and 20 fats being utilized and so you might think okay I need to find that type or form or intensity of exercise where I'm burning the highest percentage of fats but we're going to find that there's a little bit more to it than just that for example one of the times that we burn the highest percentage or portion of fats to carbs is actually at rest and most of us have a pretty good idea that sitting on our gluteus maximus or on our butts is probably not an effective strategy to actually burn a lot of fat so like I said there's a bit more to it than that so let's get into that but real quick before we get into the fat burning zones and the different types of exercise I want to take a second to say thank you to the sponsor of today's video athletic greens athletic greens is a nutritional company that makes an amazing nutritional drink called ag1 ag1 is far more than just a greens powder as it's packed with 75 different ingredients that includes vitamins minerals superfoods probiotics and adaptogens now I am all about simplifying my morning routine and ag1 has helped me to do this I no longer have to open up multiple pill bottles as this has helped me to completely replace my daily vitamin all I do is take that wonderful ag-1 bottle fill it up with eight ounces of water take one scoop and shake it up and then dump it in the oral cavity and as an added bonus it positively stimulates your gustatory receptors or your taste buds as it tastes great prior to moving down to the fundus of your stomach now we are obviously going to talk about exercise and how that relates to fat burning and I think we can all agree that exercise becomes more enjoyable and more effective when we feel like we can perform at a high level as well as recover quickly between workouts and ag-1 can help with this as again it's packed with superfoods and things like magnesium that can help with Muscle Recovery it can also help Boost energy levels which is a huge Plus for me because I'm not a big coffee drinker nor do I drink any other beverages with caffeine for that matter ag1 is also NSF certified which is super important to me because I want to know what's on the label is actually found within the product so if you're interested go to athleticgreens. com human anatomy and they'll give our audience a free one-year supply of immune supporting vitamin D3 plus K2 as well as five free travel packets with your first purchase we'll also have that link in the description below so let's get into some of these details about this potential fat burning Zone and we've got this chart to help us out with this and when I first came across a chart that was similar to this years ago as a student I was totally fascinated because it really helps to show how exercise intensity influences how our bodies utilize fats compared to carbohydrates and will help us find this fat burning Zone also keep in mind that this data came from a male in his 40s that was training for a marathon so these numbers and percentages won't be the exact same in me or you but the numbers would be close but the overall pattern that we're going to see is going to be important of the carbohydrate to Fat ratio and that pattern can definitely be applied to all of us so we're going to take a given exercise intensity and at a given intensity we're going to see a percentage of the energy burned is going to come from fat percentage of energy is going to come from carbohydrates we'll look at the total amount of calories burned in a minute and of those total calories how many came from fat and how many came from carbohydrates so again let's just start with 72 this was slightly above rest for this person and at this level of intensity you see 78. 2 percent of that energy came from fat and only 21.

8 percent came from carbs and a Nigeria reaction of us might be ah I want to be here at this percentage but again as I alluded to earlier being at rest or slightly above rest probably isn't the best strategy for burning fatter losing weight in this case and the ratios are only part of the story we have to look at this total amount of calories burned and we only burned 1. 4 in this case 1. 1 of those coming from fat and 0.

3 coming from the carbohydrates but let's see what happens when we increase the intensity we jump up to 127 beats per minute and look what happens to the percentage of fat utilized jumps down to 40. 8 percent where the carbs jump up to 59. 2 percent so again knee-jerk reaction you might be thinking I don't want to do that if I want to burn fat but again I know I'm a broken record here the ratios are not the only thing we've got to look at the total we went from 1.

4 all the way up to 11. 5 and that 11. 5 is such a big increase that even 40.

8 percent of that 11. 5 still gives us a total of 4. 7 of those calories coming from fat which you can see is definitely better than the 1.

1 and obviously the carbohydrates are going to go up mirroring that percentage increase for the carbohydrates at that intensity if we continue to increase the intensity what happens 138 we see the percentage of fat utilized continues to go down the percentage of carbohydrates utilized continues to go up total calories burned are always going to continue to go up when we increase the intensity which will be important a little bit later in the video but again of that 13. 4 37. 4 percent of 13.

4 gives us 5. so we continue to increase the amount the total amount of fat that we burned at this intensity compared to this intensity now this is only going to continue to a certain point and we've pretty much reached it with this graph because as you can see on the next line down as we increase the intensity further that percentage continues to drop for fats the percentage continues to increase for carbohydrates utilized total caloric intake makes sense it's going to continue to go up but 30. 6 percent of 14.

2 only gives us 4. 4 so this is better than this definitely but it's not even better than these two levels of intensity and again continuing on with the level of intensity you go down to 27. 2 percent of fat 72.

8 and then we're only burning 4. 2 of those total calories from fat so before we kind of get to this ideal Zone that I'm sure you guys eyeballs have already gone to let me just mention if we continue to increase the intensity all the way down here to the point where you're like full-fledged Sprint as hard as you can go you will get to a point where you're eventually pretty much only relying on carbohydrates almost 100 carbs and zero percent fats so let's jump back up to this level of intensity where we found the highest amount of fat being burned and as you probably guessed this would be considered that fat burning zone now we should ask ourselves a couple of questions one is since we found this ideal zone or this fat burning Zone should we focus the majority of our training on staying within the zone is that the most effective long-term solution to burning fat or losing weight from burning the fat and if that is the case how do you get in this Zone and what I mean by that is you can't just tell everybody just to go to 138 beats per minute and you're going to be in this fat burning Zone because heart rate and where the fat burning zone is within you depends on various factors things like age genetics gender and even Fitness status influences where this fat burning Zone would be within you now luckily we don't have to go hook ourselves up to this exercise equipment in a lab to figure out all these details because this fat burning zone is pretty close to this Zone that the endurance world or the endurance athletes refer to as zone two Zone 2 training would be this level of intensity where yeah you're working Hearts pumping you're sweating but not to the point where you couldn't maintain a conversation with say like a training partner they often refer to this as the talk test you can maintain that conversation throughout the duration of that exercise if you get to a point where you're starting to not be able to finish full sentences then you're starting to get into these higher levels of intensity and kind of moving out of that zone two or that fat burning zone for you exercise physiology nerds that would be like a blood lactate level of about 2. 0 but back to that original question if we found this is this the area that we should primarily focus on is this the greatest influence or the greatest factor when it comes to losing fat and adipose tissue and the answer to that is no not really so then what is the most important thing when it comes to losing weight through burning fat and what we find is that the total amount of calories burned is actually the more important thing to focus on rather than focusing on the specific ratio of carbs to fats or finding that perfect fat burning zone now don't get me wrong spending time in zone two or this fat burning Zone definitely has its benefits that I'm going to mention in just a second but again if the goal is just to lose fat then the focus should mostly just be on total caloric expenditure or the total amount of calories burned and to help us illustrate this there's a really cool study where they took two groups and divided one group into a low intensity group that was doing zone two the fat burning Zone and then another group was in the high intensity group now what they had to to account for in those situations was the amount of time because most of us have a pretty good idea if we spent 30 minutes at the gym and worked at a really high intensity and then we spent 30 minutes at the gym and worked at a really low intensity we know we're going to burn more calories at the higher intensity so This research study had to account for that and so the lower intensity group that zone 2 fat burning group their exercise time was increased to match the total calories burned by the higher intensity group and at the end of the study what they found is that both groups lost fat or weight at the same rate there was not a significant difference between the two groups so the study Illustrated the point that total caloric expenditure is the main thing to focus on rather than getting lost in the details of what type of exercise Zone you should spend the time in now there are pros and cons to both high intensity exercise as well as the lower intensity form like in the zone 2 or that fat burning Zone which I'll mostly refer to it as Zone 2 from here on out but with high intensity exercise some people just in Joy working at that higher intensity and from a Time efficiency perspective someone who's strapped for time could go to the gym work at a high intensity earn as many calories as they could in a shorter amount of time and then get back to life now there are some potential drawbacks to this if someone is just focusing only on high high intensity training all the time they risk over training and they also could miss out on some of the benefits that can come from this Zone 2 training now the zone 2 kind of steady state type of intensity or exercise would have cardiovascular benefits obviously the heart will get stronger granted the heart will also get stronger in high intensity training but there are kind of some unique physiological adaptations that come with zone two training you'll see an increased number of capillaries that will grow and develop within the muscle tissue so then the muscles can get more blood flow you'll also see that the muscle cells will increase the number of mitochondria mitochondria utilize things like fats and carbohydrates to create ATP which is the energy currency of our cells what we really see with people who focus in on the zone own two training is that these mitochondria get really great at utilizing fats for energy so what you could see is in the zone two or this fat burning Zone on our chart we showed it was about 37.

4 percent fat and 62.