To all members and general exercisers at our YMCA: a little info below on the ways our body burn calories, their differences, and how it can ultimately influence our fitness goals. Enjoy, continue to stay tuned in to fitness info only from your local area YMCA, and keep those questions and concerns about activity, exercise and fitness coming, and I’ll keep giving you the information in hopes of making exercise programs at the Y all they can possibly be!
One subject that has been a question of talk and discussion that I feel warrants blogging about is “How do we burn calories and what would be considered the necessary amount to burn in a given day to encourage, for instance, weight loss or overall fitness?
Well, in theory, we can burn calories in a days time in three different ways in order to accomplish the goal of staying or getting fit. The first and most important way to burn those calories, surprisingly enough, is through our body’s metabolism; our metabolism runs all the time whether exercising or not, and burns the most of our calories for us throughout the day as a daily function to keep us alive. The amount of calories our metabolism burns in a given day depends on each individual, and is the baseline amount of what our total calorie expenditure should be to remain or become fit. What our metabolic rate is, is a start, but only the beginning in burning those excess calories and balancing our energy levels. The second and third way that our body can burn calories, both occur through exercise when it’s burning calories from either carbohydrates or fat at a higher rate. Just take note that there are pros and cons to burning calories by either means. While burning calories (through exercise) from carbohydrates happens faster and at a higher rate, workouts are more intense, very taxing, and requires good cardiovascular fitness to reap high calorie expenditures. On the other hand, burning fat calories is obviously most desirable because we are burning our calories directly from our unwanted fat source, but more difficult to enter the “fat burning zone”, and duration of exercise bouts must last much longer (steady state), along with less total calorie expenditure by the end of your exercise workout– even though more calories were technically burned from fat.
Some professionals (including myself) would like to say that the “extra” calorie expenditure through exercise only occurs when the heart rate reaches or exceeds 100 beats per minute through activity or exercise. Only then can we be certain that we are burning those extra calories outside of what our body metabolism is capable of– whether from carbohydrates or fat alike. Otherwise, we would have to assume that any “calories burned” during a given workout, where the heart rate stays below 100 beats per minute, was simply what our general metabolism would have normally burned in a given day.
Let me know what you think and happy workouts!
