Optimal HR Zone for Burning Fat

[happycampyer]

If you get a power meter, it might be worth have a metabolic test done on a bike to see how much fat you burn at different wattages. Going by heart rate can be tricky, because of cardiac drift (for example, if you do a 20 minute interval at 200 watts, your heart rate will be higher at the end of the interval, even though your output is the same).

Even so, as others have said, you wouldn't want to train endlessly at the wattage that burns the highest percentage of fat. Aside from going out of your mind from monotony, you need to train in different zones to get proper adaptations in fitness. But it is good to know that at, say, x watts you burn the highest percentage of calories from fat so that you can structure some workouts around that wattage. Bear in mind that you will need to retest periodically, since those numbers change as your fitness improves.

As mentioned, some weight training is a good idea, both to help offset the potential loss of muscle mass as you lose weight and to burn more calories at rest (and not to mention other benefits like bone density, looking good in a bathing suit, etc.).

On the intake side, be mindful of what you are eating. Just because you have burned enough calories on a ride to be able to eat two croissants and drink a milkshake doesn't mean that you should. At a minimum, cut out all processed sugar/foods. I've lost a decent amount of weight (10 - 11lbs/4.5 - 5kg) over the last month by following a pseudo-paleo diet. The next 10 pounds are going to be much harder to lose.

[dustyrider]

I prefer to burn fat by not gaining it. I know you're looking for something you can monitor via cycling, but I just feel like burning fat is the wrong way to think about exercise. Exercise should bring you enjoyment, gains in performance, and increased health benefits first and foremost.

If I stop consuming beer/alcohol, I can keep 10 pounds off without changing anything else about my diet or exercise. If I limit my food intake, I can keep 10 pounds off without my performance suffering. When I do both at the same time, I feel good enough to keep another 5 pounds off because it becomes easier to be so much more active. I like to think about my diet as a way to improve my recovery; it makes it easier to stay on track because I'm making choices for the moment rather than the next bike ride/run. In the long run, the sooner I can run/ride the happier I'll be.

Sorry to derail the thread. There's some good knowledge up in here!

[11.4]

Doing a long fasting ride isn't a good way to go about this. The clinical evidence is that you can lose weight from it, but you lose a significant part of it from muscle mass. It also depletes mineral deposition in the bones and leads to degradation of tendons, which leaves you in worse shape than you are with some extra weight on you. A good example of this is some training that Sky did about three years ago early season, thinking that fasting rides would overall be beneficial. However, they led to abnormal cortisol levels, tendon weakness (which led to all kinds of muscle and joint issues that directly affected performance) and reduced muscle mass.

There still seems to be a search here for an optimal training band for weight loss. If you want weight loss, maximize your caloric burn and minimize your caloric consumption. If you want cycling fitness or overall fitness or health, temper both those by being smart. Limit your caloric burn to workouts which don't have a detrimental effect on you, and improve your calories consumed by eating wisely -- avoiding the easy components such as processed carbohydrates, sugars, and so on.

Perhaps the missing issue here is how the body regulates. We understand better now how complicated a feedback system is at work. It's not only insulin, but also cortisol, it's about intestinal biome metabolism, and a variety of other systems that all interrelate and act to confound your best efforts to lose weight. In the end there's no simple answer. One can't even exercise hard enough to take off the pounds from what one eats. It ultimately comes down to consuming less -- that's the only consistently demonstrated solution that your body doesn't try to work around, and even then, after taking weight off, your body will self-regulate to a new higher level of efficiency to maintain weight at a lower body weight. It's not an easy answer or a pretty picture, but it's basically the only answer in town.

[weisan]

11.4 pal, thank you.

[happycampyer]

Originally Posted by 11.4

<snip>

There still seems to be a search here for an optimal training band for weight loss. If you want weight loss, maximize your caloric burn and minimize your caloric consumption. If you want cycling fitness or overall fitness or health, temper both those by being smart. Limit your caloric burn to workouts which don't have a detrimental effect on you, and improve your calories consumed by eating wisely -- avoiding the easy components such as processed carbohydrates, sugars, and so on.

I would just note that this can be--and shouldn't be--over-done, which I'm pretty sure you would agree with. If on a rest day one burns, say, 2,000 calories, and on the next day one goes for a long ride and burns 5,000 calories that day, one can't just take in 1,000 calories a day for both days and expect to lose weight, or at least not fat weight. The intake should be at a deficit, but not such a deficit that it causes the body's metabolism to slow down.

To the OP, if you're looking to lose 15kg, you probably need to do more than cycling. Try to avoid being sedentary. Walk or ride a beater bike for short trips if you can. Park at the far end of a parking lot instead of searching for the closest space. Take stairs. What you do off the bike is as important as what you on it.

[ripvanrando]

Originally Posted by SoCalSteve

How long a ride are you talking about without eating? I’d be so afraid of bonking doing this. Seriously afraid. Have you ever bonked? It’s not fun. At all.

Anything more than 2 hours without replenishing your stores is a recipe for bonking.

Not sure this is such great advice. Again, if you’ve ever bonked, you will never ever want to do this again. Ever.

2 hours? I suppose it depends upon the effort but OP wants to lose weight and most rides are not at or near threshold. I guess what is a long ride.

447 Km is about as far as I have ridden without food but 3-4 hours with two bottles of water would be more typical for me.

The key point of the base period in the old days at least was to develop the aerobic capacity and ability to burn fat. Stuffing one's face with sugary drinks releases insulin inhibiting the release of free fatty acids. Obviously blood glucose levels and stored glycogen are critical during a race. However, my point remains. To lose fat you have to burn it one way or another and avoiding the roller coaster of insulin spikes helps in that regard, especially during rides when the key objective is weight loss. YMMV

Edit: my original post indicated to eat a normal diet.....I'm not advocating fasting.....glycogen stores and liver should sufficient stores to fuel 2 hour rides when much of the energy is fat oxidation. 14 hours of riding a week is a lot. Eating a normal diet and not increasing food intake.....weight should melt off

[velofinds]

I understood exactly what ripvanrando was saying. I don't think any reasonable person would interpret that to mean riding to the point of bonking. The description fits a classic medium-to-low intensity ride.

The length of the ride and what one considers a "long" ride to be will obviously vary from person to person, but one would have to gradually build up one's ability to ride in a fasted state as opposed to attempting a 2-3 hour ride right away, which would only end up being a miserable experience.

[echappist]

Originally Posted by happycampyer

I would just note that this can be--and shouldn't be--over-done, which I'm pretty sure you would agree with. If on a rest day one burns, say, 2,000 calories, and on the next day one goes for a long ride and burns 5,000 calories that day, one can't just take in 1,000 calories a day for both days and expect to lose weight, or at least not fat weight. The intake should be at a deficit, but not such a deficit that it causes the body's metabolism to slow down.

To the OP, if you're looking to lose 15kg, you probably need to do more than cycling. Try to avoid being sedentary. Walk or ride a beater bike for short trips if you can. Park at the far end of a parking lot instead of searching for the closest space. Take stairs. What you do off the bike is as important as what you on it.

yes to both points made.

I was told that at my weight (70kg), one should average about 500-700 kcal deficit per day. My rest metabolic need was probably 2400 kcal/day.

I've also not done any fasting rides for more than 90-105 minutes. Sooner or later, I need to begin fueling again

[ripvanrando]

The best advice I read somewhere was along the lines, "You can't out ride a bad diet" and exercising during a true fast is a bad dietary idea. Using last night's dinner to fuel a morning ride? I wasn't advocating training while fasting.

An important consideration is how much time one can devote to riding. If someone does not have a lot of time and say can only ride 3 days per week, those rides should be pretty hard whereas if someone has the time to ride many hours per day, these rides would naturally be lower paced (zone 2 or maybe some in zone 3). I do like the TSB lines in performance management chart in TP as a way to keep it honest.

Someone mentioned cortisol. As we get older, hormonal recovery is not as easy irrespective of diet or at least for me. Joe Friel recommends 9 day training weeks for some older riders so that they can get the essential intensity rides in.

33 pounds that the OP has to go is a lot to lose. The irony is that is my exact amount to racing weight that I have to lose. Maybe a little side bet on who get there first. I'm just not motivated to stop stuffing my face.

[benb]

Yah if you're time limited at all on how much cardio/riding you're doing ignore all this stuff and just go out and ride as hard as you can. You'll burn more calories and probably more total fat calories as well.

As others have said, that fat burning zone is just based on "percentage of calories burned from fat". It is not showing you what is the zone that actually burns the most calories from fat.

e.x.:

Fat burning you might be riding 14mph or something and you'll come up with a calories/hour of 400 or something. And say that's the "zone" and you burn 50% from fat, so 200 calories of fat and 200 of glycogen/whatever.

If you burn 1000 calories per hour riding at 20mph you supposedly only burn 35% of your calories from fat. That's 350 calories/hr of fat.

Most people who are time limited are not riding at 20mph average pace, that's just an example to show how flawed the whole thing is.

This whole thing is one of the reasons so many people in the gym can't figure out why they never lose weight when they go to the gym 3-5X a week and use the cardio machines at low intensity for 20-30 minutes each time.

If you're ripvanrando and you ride 15k miles per year or something you can't ride high intensity that much so maybe some of this stuff starts to matter but for the rest of us just ride for speed/power/endurance whatever the training plan is and the weight will come off if you ride enough and don't over eat.

I know for me there is a point somewhere between 7-10 hours per week where the weight is just going to start to come off no matter what. I don't have the capacity for endless hours some people do but that is still enough time riding that I can't ride that much at high intensity but the average intensity is still enough I lose weight fairly quickly and then have to work to maintain it.

[echappist]

Originally Posted by benb

Yah if you're time limited at all on how much cardio/riding you're doing ignore all this stuff and just go out and ride as hard as you can. You'll burn more calories and probably more total fat calories as well.

only caveat here is that it leads to over-reaching, if not over-training

when my hours got reduced over the years, i begin to do more and more high-intensity (threshold level or above) on a weekly basis. When i started, i didn't dare do more than 2 sessions/week; last year, it got to 4 or even 5/week. Being able to do high intensity takes a few years (or perhaps months, if one's lucky) to get there, and it's not recommended that one dives into the deep end immediately

also, this is the other reason why cycling is better than running for losing weight: you can't go that long (or hard) as a runner when you are 15kg over weight due to the physical impact. It's pretty much a non-issue for cycling.

[hobbanero]

Echappist's data really tells the story here. For a long time we were told that Zones 1 and 2 are where you ride to burn fat. In those zones, you are burning primarily fat (rather than glycogen) as fuel, but you are not burning as many calories per hour. Since even at VO2 efforts you are still primarily aerobic, you are always burning fat. And you have to factor in the caloric requirements for recovery.

Below is a screenshot from a metabolic test I did a while ago on an ergo with a gas exchange mask to measure fuel usage.
[IMG][/IMG]

This shows that you still burn plenty of fat at tempo (I think 320 was my LT at the time), but the ideal pace for fat burning is zone 1/2. As a reference, at the time my threshold HR was 170bpm, and 120-140bpm was Z2.

But, interestingly, I always lose the last couple of winter kilos after I transition from Z2 work to VO2 intervals. Even though my training load (measured by TSS) probably goes down a bit, the high intensity work seems to burn off more fat. Why? Recovery needs? I don't know for sure...but it happens every season.

So you can go harder and still burn lots of fat. You have to keep in mind your available training and recovery time, of course. Going hard all the time obviously leads to problems.

[54ny77]

To burn fat fast, you need at least a 5.7 liter Hemi V8.

[echappist]

Originally Posted by hobbanero

But, interestingly, I always lose the last couple of winter kilos after I transition from Z2 work to VO2 intervals. Even though my training load (measured by TSS) probably goes down a bit, the high intensity work seems to burn off more fat. Why? Recovery needs? I don't know for sure...but it happens every season.

So you can go harder and still burn lots of fat. You have to keep in mind your available training and recovery time, of course. Going hard all the time obviously leads to problems.

same here; high intensity stuff and training races actually make me leaner, despite the reduced energy output during the week

perhaps all that after-burning hypothesis is valid after all

Originally Posted by 54ny77

To burn fat fast, you need at least a 5.7 liter Hemi V8.

ain't no replacement for displacement