Fatburn myth: ‘the low intensity fatburn zone’

Burning fat optimally sounds great to everyone who has goals related to this subject. Being able to burn fat locally is unfortunately a myth, it is not possible. However, the fat burn zone does exist.

The principle of the fat burn zone sounds ideal: training at a low intensity so that you get less tired, whilst accomplishing burning fat! No wonder some training programs use this term for promotion, and it's no surprise that a lot of people are interested. Unfortunately, the reality is less likeable. The theory is based on the idea that lower-intensity exercise causes you to burn calories from fat, rather than high-intensity exercise, which causes your body to need energy quickly and burn more carbohydrates. There is logic in this, but unfortunately this does not result in an effective training.

The percentage of energy (burning calories) that your body gets from burning fats increases with training at a low intensity level. However, the total number of calories burned is a lot more if you are training at a higher intensity level. Relatively speaking, the percentage of fat burning is better if you train less intensely, but because you burn a lot more calories (fat and carbohydrates) in total if you do train intensively, this is more effective for burning fat. If you add up the total calories burned at the end of a workout, you see more fat is burned at a higher intensity.

As an example, someone who jogs at very low intensity for 20 minutes burns about 65 calories from fat and 30 calories from carbohydrates (95 total). With this type of training, you would burn 68% of the calories from fat. In comparison, someone who runs for 20 minutes at a high intensity burns about 200 calories in total, 92 of which are from fat and 108 from carbohydrates. 'Only' 46% of the calories burned during high-intensity training came from fat, but if you put the total of burned fats next to each other (low intensity: 65, high intensity: 92), we see that training at higher intensity is more effective. The total number of calories burned, both from fat and carbohydrates, is higher with an intensive training compared to your sports buddy who trains in the low-intensity fat burn zone.

A myth, therefore, from which you can still get something positive: relatively speaking, you burn the highest number of calories of fat compared to carbohydrates during very low intensity, for example sleeping! Although the total number of calories burned is of course not very high. So go to bed extra early tonight :)

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