Your Heart Rate Zone to Burn Fat

As many of you know, working out at certain heart rate zone is a proven method to quickly burn fat.  It doesn't matter whether your motivation is to look great in that two piece bikini or to not feel embarrassed about taking off your shirt at the beach, exercising at your ideal heart rate zone will help you get the most out of each drop of sweat. 

The big question for most is what is my targer heart rate zone.  But before getting into how to determine your ideal heat rate zone for burning fat, a overview of your overall cardiovascular system and energy buring is in order to understand why this heart rate zone is so important. 

Your heart rate is just one component in your cardiovascular system whose primary purpose is to deliver oxygen and nutrients to the cells.  Other functions of the system includes transporting deoxygenated blood, removing metabolic waste produced from the tissues, maintaining fluid balance to prevent dehydration and maintaining body temperature by absorbing and redistributing heat. 

All of those processes require energy to perform.  This energy source comes from a compound know as adenosine triphosphate or ATP.  During any type of physical activity, the body relies on a continuous supply of ATP.  The immediate source of ATP comes from the supply stored inside the muscles of your body. 

However, this stored ATP only last enough for a few seconds of activity.  Therefore, more ATP must be furthered manufactured and this manufacturing is accomplished through the breakdown of carbohydrates into the form of glycogen and glucose inside the muscle.  This breakdown of carbs is enough to supply you additional few minutes of ATP and is an oxygen-free process know as anaerobic metabolism. 

For continued movement lasting more than a few minutes, ATP must be refilled at a higher capacity for energy production.  This is where a combination of carbs and fat with the assistance of oxygen is used to produce your energy source of ATP.  This process is know as aerobic metabolism. 

Before you can get to the aerobic metabolism stage where fat is used to help produce the energy source ATP, you must use the ATP stored in your muscle and the ATP processed from the carbs stored in your muscle.  How much time will this take? Unfortunately this is not an easy question to answer.  Experts disagree on how log it takes to reach this point.  Some say 5 to 10 minutes or more. 

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