Heart Rate Fat Loss: What to do
to be successful

There is one strategy, called heart rate fat loss which is very well known as well as analyzed, by several experts which many people seem to forget when they actually do put in the work needed to lose fat.

This one little strategy, even if you’ve gone through thousands of adjustments and modifications in your diet and you’ve tried all possible combinations of cardio and weightlifting, will provide you with that much needed push to overcome a plateau or get that extra inch off your waist.

Heart rate fat loss is a strategy that directly links our heart rate to fat loss by manipulating the range of our heart rate during aerobic exercises, thus maximizing the effectiveness of our fat loss program.

The main idea is to target our fat burning zone not with slow or moderate cardio but with moderately intense cardio or power workouts which maximize the effectiveness of any fat loss effort.

How can we calculate our target heart rate?

The experts at the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention suggest that the moderately intense zone, known as the fat burning zone, is utilized by exercising in the 60-75% of our maximum heart rate.

Maximum heart rate can be calculated by subtracting our age from the number 220.For intense exercises we can use 75-85% of our maximum heart rate.

So let’s say that you are a person at the age of 45. Your maximum heart rate is 220-45=175. The fat burning zone for you would be anywhere between 105 and 131 heart beats per minute. Your intense exercise zone would be anywhere between 131 and 148 heart beats per minute.

Therefore, to assist your efforts, even further on fat loss, you should consider working out at the optimum heart rate zone as described earlier.

Why should we manipulate heart rate and scientific proof for its effectiveness.

According to a recent publication of Thomas Baechle and Roger Earle, this simple technique of heart rate fat loss allows us, not only to burn good amounts of calories, if we do it long enough, but also increase our cardiac output when our body is in the state of rest by as much as four times! That is why during the workouts it is necessary not to always stay in low intensity zone (below 60% of our maximum heart rate), but try to exercise in moderate intensity zone (60-75%).

This strategy is linked to another effective training one, which is called high intensity interval training (HIIT). The main idea of this approach is keeping our heart rate at high levels (80-85% of maximum heart rate) for short periods of time during our workouts. In other words, HIIT involves combining low or moderate intensity exercises with some short bursts of high intensity exercises.

If you wonder about the scientific proof of the effectiveness of heart rate fat loss then you would be happy to know that there is a great deal of studies and researches which prove just that. For example experiments in University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada, have shown that two-week of intense aerobic interval training brought to 36% higher fat loss and increased cardiovascular fitness in women (published in the Journal of Applied Physiology, December 2006).

Another example is the findings of experts at MedlinePlus, a service of the National Institutes of Health, which states that working in 60-75 % of our maximum heart rate allows us burning more calories, 85% out of which are from fat.

IMPORTANT NOTICE:

Do not forget to check with your doctor or a qualified health care specialist before starting a new heart rate fat loss program or modifying the current one.

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