Work out your workout
By Anup Deb Nath

MANY people who exercise in the hope of losing weight often wonder how much they should exercise to make their workout effectively burn away the excess weight and flab. One of the reasons that most health experts advise exercise as the best means of losing weight rather than only diet control is that through exercise you tend to lose a higher percentage of fat as compared to the percentage of fat lost when you diet without any exercise at all.

There is no set time limit for exercising that can be judged as the perfect exercise time, as the intensity levels of exercise differ greatly and the exercise time will depend a lot on the intensity of the workout.

The one thing you can be sure of is that when you are exercising you are almost always burning up fat, all that differs is the rate at which you are burning it up. Maximum fat is burned when your body is working at its optimum heart level. A rough guideline given by some experts is that after working out for about 20 minutes at your optimum heart rate your body will burn up more fat than carbohydrates.

Exercise can be divided into three categories according to its intensity level. Mild exercise is that exercise which can be sustained for a long period of time and walking at a slow pace is one such type of exercise. Moderate exercise is when, during the course of your exercise routine even at the peak, you are able to talk comfortably without getting too much out of breath. A moderate exercise routine cannot be sustained as long as a mild one can. High intensity exercise can only be sustained for 30-45 minutes and you are not able to talk while working out at a high intensity level.

Contrary to popular opinion where most people feel that the harder they train or exercise the more the fat they will burn, many studies have found that where absolute fat burning is concerned, a moderate exercise routine is the best. When you exercise at about 75 per cent of your maximum heart rate you will burn approximately 0.5 gm to 1.0 gm per minute.

Also if you continue your workout for more than an hour then the fat burning can increase only slightly, by about another 10 per cent and will not be doubled, as many people like to believe. During a mild intensity workout, about 85-90 per cent of the calories burned are fat calories. In a high intensity workout, the fat burning drops to about 65 per cent of the moderate intensity level. In a high intensity workout, sugar, rather than fat, is burned as your body needs more energy to perform at the faster rate.

Another theory indicates that people who exercised on regular basis burned more fat than people who were less fit and they burned more sugar than fat.

In another study, people who ate sugar during an exercise routine were also found to burn more sugar rather than fat during the workout.

This does not mean that high intensity exercise must be shunned in favour of a moderate intensity workout as they both have their own uses. A moderate intensity workout is better than a high intensity routine, both in terms of fat burning as well as lowering one’s chances of injury. But for people who are short of time on a particular day, it is perfectly alright to do a shorter duration, high intensity workout rather than none at all. If you do a moderate intensity workout your exercise duration has to be longer than that of a high intensity workout.

One of the best ways is to combine the two in a single workout. This is often the best answer to those who like a high intensity workout but need a moderately paced one.

How often you should work out is a question that has been debated many times over. Frankly you are not over-exercising if you workout everyday and you are not abusing or burning your body up as long as your exercise routine is sensible and well-balanced.

If you are active and have been exercising regularly, a daily workout of moderate intensity will do you no harm. If you are a beginner then you must workout everyday but at a low intensity to begin with and slowly build it up. In many ways it is more important for a beginner to workout everyday as they will get attuned to the exercise faster. In addition, initially there is bound to be some exercise-related soreness which only goes away when you workout again.

Exercising everyday at a sensible level with well-structured exercise routines will in no way harm you but benefit you in the long run. Remember that all the professional sportsmen, athletes, gymnasts as well as the aerobics trainers all workout six days a week and are certainly none the worse for it.

This feature was published on December 5, 1999