Polar FT4 Heart Rate Monitor


By Steve Zones


In terms of weight loss the vital thing many people take into consideration is that they have to do hours and hours of cardio. A lot of people spend too many hours counting the calories they burn on the treadmill or elliptical machine. Other people are using a heart monitor to stay in their fat loss zone for hours hoping the fat will burn away.

To understand heart rate training, we first have to begin to understand how our bodies produce and use energy. We have two major processes that produce energy within our bodies. First, our aerobic metabolism utilizes oxygen combined with carbs (sugar) and fat to produce our long lasting energy and the energy you are using to read this article.

The second way you produce energy is anaerobically. Your anaerobic metabolism creates energy for short durations of intense activity. Your only source of energy for your anaerobic metabolism is carbohydrates in your blood stream (blood glucose) or carbs stored in your muscle cells (glycogen). So aerobic burns fat and carbs, and anaerobic burns carbs only.

Proper heartbeat training has three distinctive training zones each designed to challenge your metabolism to become faster and more efficient which leads to burning more fat.

Fat Burning Zone 1

The very first zone (zone 1) for ideal fat burning cardio includes exercising at a moderate intensity level. You want to workout at an intensity that you can sustain for extended amounts of time, higher than 30 min. regularly. With training, it's great to be effective up to consistent cardio exercise for 60 min. The aim in zone 1 is to train one's body to shed fat efficiently. Don't be very worried about how precisely many calories you burn through the workout. A suitable fat burning zone workout trains your metabolic process to shed more fat by effectively training your body to release more fat out of your fat cells the entire day while you're not exercising.

Anaerobic Limit Zone 2

For the second zone (zone 2), we want to train as close as we can to our anaerobic threshold. A measure to find this point is the highest constant heart rate you can sustain for 15-20 min. The goal of zone 2 is to train your aerobic metabolism to burn energy as fast as it can. Your metabolism then adapts and you burn more energy 24 hours a day. Zone two is the workout that I see that every exerciser skips. Most people either spend all their time in the easy zone 1 or do high intensity training all the time which we are going to talk about next. Working out at the moderately high intensity in zone 2 is essential to training our aerobic metabolism which is our major source of energy all day.

High Intensity Zone 3

The third zone for optimal fat burning cardio is training at high intensities (zone 3). One more name for this zone is interval training. Interval training workout is where we exercise for brief burst of your time, 1-3 min., and then walk or rest for brief breaks of time, after which repeat the high to low sequence again. Zone 3 workout routines train the body to make energy higher than it's got ever done before for brief durations of time.

Each zone has key aspects to your total fat burning program. An optimal program consists of workouts in all three zones each week. Every person's heart rate is going to be different for each zone. Heart rate zones between people can vary by over 20 beats, so training at your friend's zone doesn't work. Start training at all three zones each week and start burning more fat 24 hours a day.




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