Burning the Fat

I have recently come to the conclusion, that if you have trained your body to burn fat more, than you will be a more successful athlete. If you know me, you know I struggle with my weight. If my body was better able to burn my fat as its energy, than losing the weight would not be such a problem. Being able to burn more fat will come into its own is in the race, the athlete that can use their fat stores more efficiently than the athlete that has to rely on carbohydrates entirely for their fuel, will in the long run preform better. Fat burning is a component of fitness, well endurance fitness. To reach your peak endurance fitness you need to have a body that has been trained to use its fats stores for energy as much as possible.

So who does burn the fat

There was a study done that looked at the athletes and how they fueled most of their enery. It found that there was a wide variation in the amount of fat that is oxidized at rest. Some of the athletes were deriving almost 100% of their resting energy from fat, while others were only deriving 25%. Those subjects who burned more fat at rest also burned more fat at ALL EXERCISE INTENSITIES.

So what allows us to burn the fat

1. Free Fatty Acids

The higher the concentration of FFA in the blood the more likely you are to burn fat. The higher the concentration of Glucose in the blood will reduce the concentration of FFA in the blood. This means that if the blood sugar levels are high than you will not be able to train the muscles to ‘learn’ to use fat as a fuel.

2. Fat Burning Enzymes in the muscle

Oh this is technical, and I don’t want to send you to sleep, just know that you need them

3. Mitochondrial content within the muscle

Mitrochodrial burn the FFA’s, the more you have the more they burn

How do we improve burning the fat

1. Cut sugar from your diet (and moderate total CHO intake)

2. Train MORE in your aerobic zones (cut out the hard stuff until you’re ready for it).

A practical example

Nutrition: Our 2 goals for this athlete were (A) an improvement in fat oxidation at all intensities (B) a reduction in bodyweight. In order to accomplish these goals, I put this athlete on a diet of 400g of CHO/200g of (lean) Protein and 100g of (good) Fat. This represents 3300kcal/day and 48%/24%/28% macronutrient breakdown. Irrespective of whether the diet is eucaloric or not, I have found these percentages to be ideal in the base phase of training. This is (indirectly) also supported by the literature, e.g. Bergstrom et al. (1967) – check this study out. Lots of practical implications for the endurance athlete!!

Training: To support our objectives, training volume was quite high (20-23hrs/wk) but initially of a very low intensity (with most sessions having a cap of 50 beats below max!!) Incidentally, this is the sort of training that a very successful German ex-pro triathlete advocated when I was fortunate enough to chat with him about how he reached the pinnacle of the sport. It is what Dan Empfield called in an article about how the Germans trained “ridiculously slow”.

Our key sessions each week were a 4hr long flat bike (usually a trainer session due to weather constraints) followed the day after by a long, relatively flat hike of 4+ hours. Other sessions during the week were an aerobic maintenance brick, a strength maintenance session and several technique focused swims.

Alan Couzens

So what does this mean for me

Generally, if it’s a fat-burning, aerobic workout consider ingesting more fat. If it’s a sugar-burning, anaerobic workout consider taking in a higher percentage of carbohydrates. Increasing your dietary fat intake has been shown to increase your fat burning.

hmmm… increase the fat intake for the aeorbic workouts… interesting.

I think I will have to look into this further before I consider changing my routine, and also getting further details on what everyone recommends.

References

As always I have copied (and in some cases plagiarised) these guys, and drawn my own conclusions, if you want draw your own, follow these links

http://alancouzens.blogspot.com/2008/05/improving-fat-oxidation.html

http://msteinmetz.blogspot.com/2008/07/head-scratching-moments.html

http://chuckiev.blogspot.com/2008/01/nutrition-notes_08.html

http://www.justindaerr.com/blog/index.php/recovery/

Just some notes

I have been working on another article “Quantity is Quality” for the last few weeks. I am trying to get my head around my position. So could take me a few more weeks to complete.

One thing I have discovered from that article and even this one, is that there, really isn’t that much information around 8+ hours endurance sport. This is mainly because that up until 20years (or maybe even 10) the “every day” athletes idea of a endurance sport was a marathon.