June 07
Q. “Ali is the fastest way for me to lose weight, walking, running, or jogging?”
A. Very popular question, I have had this one thousands of times over the years. OK, I am going to do my best not to get to technical here in explaining this admittedly confusing answer.
Everyone has a Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) the rate at which your individual body burns calories, converts energy, assimilates food, etc. When you do an aerobic exercise like power walking, jogging, or running your BMR increases and how much it increases depends on your individual rate of exertion, after you finish the activity, your BMR goes back down within 10-30 minutes. Your BMR being high is a good thing that is the key to losing excess body fat.
Performing aerobic exercise or when you walk, jog, or run, your body has two energy sources to choose from, one is muscle and the other is fat. I have to mention here I am using these terms to make it very easy to understand.
If you are power walking or slow jogging the muscle is not activated enough so the fat takes over as the energy source. So you are burning fat but less calories because of the lower intensity.
If you run the muscle takes over and the fat is not activated enough, so you burn more calories because of the higher intensity, but you are not burning fat.
That being said, the answer as you can see is not an answer to be given as fact but rather as the choice of the person asking the question.
If you want to lose weight through running, sprinting, bike riding fast, swimming sprints, you will burn more calories, but if you will power walk or slow jog, swim slow, bike ride slow for longer durations you will burn more fat.
Now just to make it more interesting here is a physiological fact: Your BMR increases when you perform aerobic exercise and after you finish it goes back down within 10-30 minutes. When you perform resistance training a.k.a. weight training your BMR goes up and after you finish it stays up from 4-18 hours! I’ll continue next month.
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