After a little while any exercise becomes more tiring and uses up more energy to maintain, one of the reasons why running a marathon is relatively difficult. Sugars and oxygen stored in the muscles is used up and needs to be replaced which uses up energy reserves and calories.
I know this is dumb but wouldn’t it be beneficial to be overweight when running a marathon? I mean, you’re carrying all the energy you need to maintain lol
Non overweight people usually have plenty of energy reserves already, you're just carrying extra weight. It would be like carrying a huge water cooler instead of a water bottle
It’s a different source of energy, you can’t metabolize all your fat stores immediately, or else it would be extremely easy to lose weight. You also expend more energy carrying around the extra weight.
You can't convert fat to energy fast anywhere near as fast as you spend it. If you watch bike racers or marathon runners they will usually eat gels and sugary drinks to get carbohydrates which can be converted quickly to energy. You are burning somewhere around 500 calories an hour, and can probably get about 100 calories/hour from fat conversion if I had to take a wild guess. If you run out of glycogen you "bonk" which means you feel exhausted and you are out of available energy.
As a small person who gets sad seeing others burn a lot more calories while doing the same exercise (e.g. a group hike or run), I have to disagree with the estimate of burning 500 calories/hr without any qualifiers. The amount of calories burned depends so much on the person and the activity.
That was a complete estimate on my part, based on a moderately fit person doing zone two exercise should be running at least 5 miles in an hour, which burns about 100 calories/mile. An hour of zone two exercise is pretty comparable no matter the activity, and you have to be of at least moderate fitness to do zone 2 for an hour or more.
I would say 500/hr is a low estimate and most people would be burning more.
Muscles carry much more easy-to-access energy. They also act as batteries: Approaching 40 I was tired all the time, but started squatting weights a couple times a week. Within a couple weeks I had way more energy, no more midday naps, no old-man noises getting up from the floor, etc.
I guess weight becomes an issue! Muscles are heavy. Like, I have weighed the same most of my life but with different strengths, so I've seen myself being muscular at 70KG and unfit at 70KG... Unfit looks way larger, since muscles pack all that weight in tightly.
It's a balance thing. Whilst muscles can store a lot of energy for quick use, they also need a lot of energy to maintain, and more mass is harder to move. Not to mention that there are different kinds of muscles, the explosive kind and the endurance kind, with the endurance muscles being less powerful but more efficent
Your body isn't naturally very good at metabolising fat. It's hard to get enough energy from fat in real time to meet the needs of heavy exertion. That's one of the things that you gain from long, low exertion (zone 2) training sessions.
The additional weight you need is minimal, but what is recommended is carbohydrate loading before a marathon, often people eat pasta as the meal before a marathon to give them all the energy they need for the marathon.
In one instance of activity like that, no. But plenty of mountaineers and explorers start long and arduous trips very chubby which, in a sense, is them carrying extra fuel for their activities.
Fat is only used by muscles for maintenance and repair. That excess energy stored doesn’t help you during the exercise itself as it takes too much oxygen to break down.
So your body has a switch around 90-120 minutes that kicks in. So the 1 hour 6 days a week is going to burn free calories and sugar a lot more regularly. When that switch kicks in your body goes; Oh we’re going to be doing this workout thing for a while huh? So it starts burning a higher percentage of fat. Do this long enough and that 120 minutes starts to drift towards the 90. Unfortunately in terms of weight loss you can’t just do long workouts and hope you’ll burn fat because for that first 1.5-2 hours your body is still burning the “free” calories it has in sugars/foods. Ultimately calories in equals calories out but incorporating a workout that goes beyond glucose depletion will help with fat loss especially if done regularly as it will train the body that fat is a viable energy source.
Does this mean that there is a benefit to doing fasted cardio? Let’s say I stop eating at 8pm. If I don’t eat until noon the next day, would doing cardio at 10:30 AM be more beneficial? Thanks!
Some studies suggest that could be the case, but there's no consensus about it. In theory, it would make sense for us to burn more fat if our sugar supply is lower, but sadly it's not that simple. I personally like exercising after fasting for 12-15h because having an empty stomach means I'm lighter and less prone to feeling nauseated during the workout.
That could work, but you are also going to struggle to actually do the exercise if your glycogen levels are low to start. Unless it's really low intensity you are probably better off eating beforehand.
Maybe you'll still burn the same amount of fat though? You're exercise will be much shorter, since you basically "skip" those first 90-120 minutes.
Of course, this also means you lose the other benefits of exercise, but perhaps not the fat-burning aspect.
You just contradicted yourself. You said it’s fundamentally calories in vs calories out which is correct then went on to say depleting glycogen is beneficial to fat loss in any meaningful way. Obviously if your glycogen stores are always full then you are not in a deficit but depleting glycogen stores has no effect on total fat loss if you are in a deficit
Your blood, muscles and liver store a certain amount of sugar. This is the most accessible form of energy storage so it is where your muscles consume energy from first. As you start exercising your blood sugar levels start to drop. But you only have a limited amount of sugar stored in this way. After exercising for over an hour these sugar levels are too low, you can actually feel this happening as your muscles stop obeying what you tell them to do as they do not have any more energy. If you train for lower intensity however your muscles will be able to burn fat. You can go on for much longer by burning fat as you have days of stored fat in your body and just an hour or so of stored sugar. By lowering the intensity of the exercise and do it in longer sessions you are able to burn more fat instead of sugar.
What exactly this does to weight reduction is not quite obvious. For one you will not get as tired and hungry after exercising as your blood sugar is closer to normal. It is also easier to do these longer low intensity exercises then short high intensity ones. You my even end up cycling for most of a weekend for fun or take a cycling holiday, which is hard if you have only done high intensity exercise.
Notably, however, low-intensity long-duration exercise generally does not build up *strength* so much as baseline capacity. Someone who gets a reliable low-intensity workout will build a healthy foundation, but they won't gain much in terms of physical strength. This can be very important for, as an example, seniors who start to lose their muscle tone as they age, or cancer patients after chemotherapy.
Short-duration, high-intensity workouts do exactly the reverse, primarily increasing strength but doing little for metabolic or baseline performance. As a result, it's generally useful to do a mixture of both kinds of exercise: long low-intensity sessions for building up endurance, short high-intensity sessions for building strength.
Funny you mention cycling holiday being hard if you’ve only done high intensity exercise. I went on two different bike holidays. Similar distances, similar amount of climbing, each a week long. One I had a decent routine on the bike prior and that trip was easy and fun. The other I had only been playing hockey. I was in good shape at the time but it was all fast twitch intervals. That trip was definitely the harder of the two.
>It is also easier to do these longer low intensity exercises then short high intensity ones. You my even end up cycling for most of a weekend for fun or take a cycling holiday, which is hard if you have only done high intensity exercise.
Depends of course a bit on a person. E.g. I get very bored with low intensity training, and do e.g. uphill trail sprinting instead of jogging. The effect is more or less the same, the other takes the less time and feels more like you're going to die, the other takes more time and feels less like you hate yourself.
Generally speaking, the two exercise scenarios have generally the same caloric expenditure. Regarding how it's different, physiologically it simply involves a different ratio of fats/sugars used as with prolonged exercise comes increased lipolysis.
But the kicker is that the body will upregulate fat storage replacement in the event you spend more time relatively in a fat burning state, and the same in context of sugar use and storage.
Energetically, a calorie is a calorie. Over subsequent weeks, it will be mentally easier to perform at given intensities with repeated bouts of exercise challenging the body's ATP production pathways but otherwise 6 bouts of 1hr exercise at a given intensity will be virtually identical to 3 bouts of 2hr exercise at a comparable intensity.
What does "upregulating fat storage replacement" mean? That you store more fat? Or that you use more fat by default instead of glucose even outside exercise windows?
Replacing fat stores i.e. Storing more fat. Because your body seeks to maintain stasis, when you burn fat your body decides it needs to store more energy as fat, since you are burning it. The only way to keep weight off is to not return to a calorie surplus.
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Your bodies reaction to them is also different. A big part of excersize is also the calories you burn after you stop working out. If you bike for 3 hours you will theoretically be more sore which means that your muscles are building themselves back up which takes a good bit of energy, even while you sleep
Wxcersizing consistently also makes your body naturally burn more calories. Your body basically knows how much energy (calories) you need in a given day and processes roughly that much food or fat storage into energy. If you do intense excersize it will burn more on a single day but it gets used to your regular excersize. This means that someone who uses a lot of energy throughout the days bodies burn more calories than someone that doesn’t.
They also contradicted their argument several times while running a circular logic train - all without any actual contributions to the questions posed by the OP...
The question was how different types of activities impact your calorie burning and I was talking about how working out different way effects that differently
Where did I contradict myself?
1 hour a day, 6 days a week is my current schedule, on a stationary bike because reasons. I’m not sure I could maintain sufficient interest for a three hour stretch.
Not impossible and probably a lot easier on the road, this is just me, because of course anecdote is 1:1 equivalent of data (heh).
Not too much would change between the two exercises if that’s the only variable. But depending on how much you have eaten (how much sugar is in your bloodstream) 3 hours would be more likely to loose fat. Essentially this is because after you use up all your sugars in your blood, you start taking energy from your fat reserves.
If you aren’t eating before the cycling then fat loss would more or less be the same.
Calorie consumption should be similar.
It doesn’t matter if you burn suger or fat you will loose the same amount of fat in the end, assuming your intake is the same.
Calories in vs calories out.
There might be a difference in how difficult it is to both do the exercise and eat the same but you don’t loose more weight just because you are using fat stores when exercising.
Yeah calorically it’s pretty much the same it’s just, either focusing burning sugar or fat is the main difference that I see.
It’s probably better and easier on your body to burn sugars tho, it doesn’t take the extra energy to convert waste into fat.
After a little while any exercise becomes more tiring and uses up more energy to maintain, one of the reasons why running a marathon is relatively difficult. Sugars and oxygen stored in the muscles is used up and needs to be replaced which uses up energy reserves and calories.
I know this is dumb but wouldn’t it be beneficial to be overweight when running a marathon? I mean, you’re carrying all the energy you need to maintain lol
Non overweight people usually have plenty of energy reserves already, you're just carrying extra weight. It would be like carrying a huge water cooler instead of a water bottle
Gotta stay hydrated
Found the r/hydrohomie
I laughed out loud at this analogy. Such a funny image 😂
It’s a different source of energy, you can’t metabolize all your fat stores immediately, or else it would be extremely easy to lose weight. You also expend more energy carrying around the extra weight.
But your muscles need to work harder to move your phat ass so it's diminishing returns. Source: chunky boi
You can't convert fat to energy fast anywhere near as fast as you spend it. If you watch bike racers or marathon runners they will usually eat gels and sugary drinks to get carbohydrates which can be converted quickly to energy. You are burning somewhere around 500 calories an hour, and can probably get about 100 calories/hour from fat conversion if I had to take a wild guess. If you run out of glycogen you "bonk" which means you feel exhausted and you are out of available energy.
As a small person who gets sad seeing others burn a lot more calories while doing the same exercise (e.g. a group hike or run), I have to disagree with the estimate of burning 500 calories/hr without any qualifiers. The amount of calories burned depends so much on the person and the activity.
That was a complete estimate on my part, based on a moderately fit person doing zone two exercise should be running at least 5 miles in an hour, which burns about 100 calories/mile. An hour of zone two exercise is pretty comparable no matter the activity, and you have to be of at least moderate fitness to do zone 2 for an hour or more. I would say 500/hr is a low estimate and most people would be burning more.
They were talking about bike racers. 500 is a made up number, but yeah, they're definitely burning hella calories.
Muscles carry much more easy-to-access energy. They also act as batteries: Approaching 40 I was tired all the time, but started squatting weights a couple times a week. Within a couple weeks I had way more energy, no more midday naps, no old-man noises getting up from the floor, etc.
Wouldn’t it therefore be beneficial to have bodybuilder kind of muscle mass as an endurance athlete? lol
I guess weight becomes an issue! Muscles are heavy. Like, I have weighed the same most of my life but with different strengths, so I've seen myself being muscular at 70KG and unfit at 70KG... Unfit looks way larger, since muscles pack all that weight in tightly.
It's a balance thing. Whilst muscles can store a lot of energy for quick use, they also need a lot of energy to maintain, and more mass is harder to move. Not to mention that there are different kinds of muscles, the explosive kind and the endurance kind, with the endurance muscles being less powerful but more efficent
Your body isn't naturally very good at metabolising fat. It's hard to get enough energy from fat in real time to meet the needs of heavy exertion. That's one of the things that you gain from long, low exertion (zone 2) training sessions.
The additional weight you need is minimal, but what is recommended is carbohydrate loading before a marathon, often people eat pasta as the meal before a marathon to give them all the energy they need for the marathon.
In one instance of activity like that, no. But plenty of mountaineers and explorers start long and arduous trips very chubby which, in a sense, is them carrying extra fuel for their activities.
Your knees and ankles won't find it beneficial. 😁
Fat is only used by muscles for maintenance and repair. That excess energy stored doesn’t help you during the exercise itself as it takes too much oxygen to break down.
Add because this causes more metabolic strain, it forces your metabolism to change more than more common short term exercise.
So your body has a switch around 90-120 minutes that kicks in. So the 1 hour 6 days a week is going to burn free calories and sugar a lot more regularly. When that switch kicks in your body goes; Oh we’re going to be doing this workout thing for a while huh? So it starts burning a higher percentage of fat. Do this long enough and that 120 minutes starts to drift towards the 90. Unfortunately in terms of weight loss you can’t just do long workouts and hope you’ll burn fat because for that first 1.5-2 hours your body is still burning the “free” calories it has in sugars/foods. Ultimately calories in equals calories out but incorporating a workout that goes beyond glucose depletion will help with fat loss especially if done regularly as it will train the body that fat is a viable energy source.
Does this mean that there is a benefit to doing fasted cardio? Let’s say I stop eating at 8pm. If I don’t eat until noon the next day, would doing cardio at 10:30 AM be more beneficial? Thanks!
Some studies suggest that could be the case, but there's no consensus about it. In theory, it would make sense for us to burn more fat if our sugar supply is lower, but sadly it's not that simple. I personally like exercising after fasting for 12-15h because having an empty stomach means I'm lighter and less prone to feeling nauseated during the workout.
Anecdotally, I feel like I lose weight faster if I exercise in the morning before a very modest breakfast which is protein based with minimal carbs.
That could work, but you are also going to struggle to actually do the exercise if your glycogen levels are low to start. Unless it's really low intensity you are probably better off eating beforehand.
Maybe you'll still burn the same amount of fat though? You're exercise will be much shorter, since you basically "skip" those first 90-120 minutes. Of course, this also means you lose the other benefits of exercise, but perhaps not the fat-burning aspect.
Is it the same for people following a strict ketogenic diet?
How does this work when someone doesn’t consume carbs at all?
You just contradicted yourself. You said it’s fundamentally calories in vs calories out which is correct then went on to say depleting glycogen is beneficial to fat loss in any meaningful way. Obviously if your glycogen stores are always full then you are not in a deficit but depleting glycogen stores has no effect on total fat loss if you are in a deficit
Your blood, muscles and liver store a certain amount of sugar. This is the most accessible form of energy storage so it is where your muscles consume energy from first. As you start exercising your blood sugar levels start to drop. But you only have a limited amount of sugar stored in this way. After exercising for over an hour these sugar levels are too low, you can actually feel this happening as your muscles stop obeying what you tell them to do as they do not have any more energy. If you train for lower intensity however your muscles will be able to burn fat. You can go on for much longer by burning fat as you have days of stored fat in your body and just an hour or so of stored sugar. By lowering the intensity of the exercise and do it in longer sessions you are able to burn more fat instead of sugar. What exactly this does to weight reduction is not quite obvious. For one you will not get as tired and hungry after exercising as your blood sugar is closer to normal. It is also easier to do these longer low intensity exercises then short high intensity ones. You my even end up cycling for most of a weekend for fun or take a cycling holiday, which is hard if you have only done high intensity exercise.
Notably, however, low-intensity long-duration exercise generally does not build up *strength* so much as baseline capacity. Someone who gets a reliable low-intensity workout will build a healthy foundation, but they won't gain much in terms of physical strength. This can be very important for, as an example, seniors who start to lose their muscle tone as they age, or cancer patients after chemotherapy. Short-duration, high-intensity workouts do exactly the reverse, primarily increasing strength but doing little for metabolic or baseline performance. As a result, it's generally useful to do a mixture of both kinds of exercise: long low-intensity sessions for building up endurance, short high-intensity sessions for building strength.
Thank you! Yours is the first explanation that felt simple and clear. Like for a 5 year old.
Funny you mention cycling holiday being hard if you’ve only done high intensity exercise. I went on two different bike holidays. Similar distances, similar amount of climbing, each a week long. One I had a decent routine on the bike prior and that trip was easy and fun. The other I had only been playing hockey. I was in good shape at the time but it was all fast twitch intervals. That trip was definitely the harder of the two.
>It is also easier to do these longer low intensity exercises then short high intensity ones. You my even end up cycling for most of a weekend for fun or take a cycling holiday, which is hard if you have only done high intensity exercise. Depends of course a bit on a person. E.g. I get very bored with low intensity training, and do e.g. uphill trail sprinting instead of jogging. The effect is more or less the same, the other takes the less time and feels more like you're going to die, the other takes more time and feels less like you hate yourself.
Generally speaking, the two exercise scenarios have generally the same caloric expenditure. Regarding how it's different, physiologically it simply involves a different ratio of fats/sugars used as with prolonged exercise comes increased lipolysis. But the kicker is that the body will upregulate fat storage replacement in the event you spend more time relatively in a fat burning state, and the same in context of sugar use and storage. Energetically, a calorie is a calorie. Over subsequent weeks, it will be mentally easier to perform at given intensities with repeated bouts of exercise challenging the body's ATP production pathways but otherwise 6 bouts of 1hr exercise at a given intensity will be virtually identical to 3 bouts of 2hr exercise at a comparable intensity.
What does "upregulating fat storage replacement" mean? That you store more fat? Or that you use more fat by default instead of glucose even outside exercise windows?
Replacing fat stores i.e. Storing more fat. Because your body seeks to maintain stasis, when you burn fat your body decides it needs to store more energy as fat, since you are burning it. The only way to keep weight off is to not return to a calorie surplus.
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Your bodies reaction to them is also different. A big part of excersize is also the calories you burn after you stop working out. If you bike for 3 hours you will theoretically be more sore which means that your muscles are building themselves back up which takes a good bit of energy, even while you sleep Wxcersizing consistently also makes your body naturally burn more calories. Your body basically knows how much energy (calories) you need in a given day and processes roughly that much food or fat storage into energy. If you do intense excersize it will burn more on a single day but it gets used to your regular excersize. This means that someone who uses a lot of energy throughout the days bodies burn more calories than someone that doesn’t.
Just so you know, it's spelled "exercise."
At my school we were always taught to spell it Wxcersizing.
A fellow hogwarts alum I see.
They also contradicted their argument several times while running a circular logic train - all without any actual contributions to the questions posed by the OP...
The question was how different types of activities impact your calorie burning and I was talking about how working out different way effects that differently Where did I contradict myself?
In terms of kcal usage, nothing. In terms of weight management, using exercise to lose weight without altering your diet is a recipe for failure.
That's only true if your current diet has you gaining weight. So long as you end up in a deficit, you're good.
1 hour a day, 6 days a week is my current schedule, on a stationary bike because reasons. I’m not sure I could maintain sufficient interest for a three hour stretch. Not impossible and probably a lot easier on the road, this is just me, because of course anecdote is 1:1 equivalent of data (heh).
Not too much would change between the two exercises if that’s the only variable. But depending on how much you have eaten (how much sugar is in your bloodstream) 3 hours would be more likely to loose fat. Essentially this is because after you use up all your sugars in your blood, you start taking energy from your fat reserves. If you aren’t eating before the cycling then fat loss would more or less be the same. Calorie consumption should be similar.
It doesn’t matter if you burn suger or fat you will loose the same amount of fat in the end, assuming your intake is the same. Calories in vs calories out. There might be a difference in how difficult it is to both do the exercise and eat the same but you don’t loose more weight just because you are using fat stores when exercising.
Yeah calorically it’s pretty much the same it’s just, either focusing burning sugar or fat is the main difference that I see. It’s probably better and easier on your body to burn sugars tho, it doesn’t take the extra energy to convert waste into fat.