If you are trying to lose weight then you know, or at least everyone tells you, that you need to do cardio. Although, I\u2019ve seen some stuff online that talks about dramatically decreasing your calorie intake to lose 20 pounds in a month. I have found this to be\u00a0a lie. I\u2019ve tried it and it didn\u2019t work. This is not a lie though, you need to do cardio but you need to know how to do it. I made this mistake for the longest time. I had a phase where I spent one hour doing hardcore elliptical, on the fat burn setting, then I did a 5k afterwards. Even after beginning to train with my personal trainer, I was still making the same mistake over and over. I was training way too hard for what I was trying to accomplish. Sure, while training this hard, I was burning a ton of calories, nearly 1000 per training session, but what I learned was that I wasn\u2019t burning the right calories. Perhaps, you\u2019re reading this right now and thinking that calories are calories, no matter how you burn them. I had that same thought several years ago in 2011. I had done some research about this topic, at that time, and came to the conclusion that it didn\u2019t matter what kind of calories I burned, I was still burning them, as long as the calories I burned were more than calories I consumed.<\/p>\n

Once I began my serious attempt at losing weight, in 2014, I lost 8 pounds my first week! This was mostly due to a change in diet. The following week, I was doing a hardcore cardio routine and I told my trainer \u201cI should\u2019ve lost more.\u201d. We evaluated what I was doing and he suggested that I do an active metabolic assessment. I agreed. After doing this assessment, I learned my biggest flaw. I found out I was over training for my goal! Your heart rate really does have an impact on your weight loss goals, even if all those websites tell you it doesn\u2019t. At that point, I now had a coach for my strength training, as well as, my cardio training.<\/p>\n

I have learned, by following the routine that my cardio trainer provided plus the strength training routine, provided by my personal trainer, that I lost the most amount of fat per week.<\/p>\n

For those of you who don\u2019t know, there are 5 heart rate zones. Each zone determines the amount of fat or carbohydrate calories that you burn. Zones one through three burn mostly fat calories and zones four through five burn mostly carbohydrate calories. Each of these zones depend on the individual. There are ways to theoretically calculate these zones but the overall best way to find these zones is to have an active metabolic assessment done, also known as, an AMA. Later in this post, I will discuss the several theoretical ways to calculate these numbers, if you are unable to get an AMA done.<\/p>\n

First, I will begin by discussing the difference between the three most common cardio routines. I have a heart rate monitor and have done the active metabolic assessment. By using these results, I have created an experiment that outlines three different types of workouts. I have used the LT Connect app to extrapolate this data and have created a similitude to express exactly a one-hour duration for each workout. The first one on the list is the pure high zone two\/low zone three\u00a0workout. These two zones are known as the pure fat burn zones, thus I\u2019ll call this the fat burn workout. I remained mostly in a high zone two and low zone three, for an hour, except during my warm up phase.<\/p>\n

Overall:<\/p>\n

I burned\u2026<\/p>\n

502.837 total calories<\/p>\n

388.963 total fat calories<\/p>\n

113.874 carbohydrate calories<\/p>\n

The second workout I did was an interval workout, for one hour, which was based off of two minutes of zone four, then a one-minute transition to zone one and seven minutes in zone three. This training is known to improve your fat burning capability. You develop your cardio ability, which leads to future fat burning improvement, as well as burning the fat you currently have.<\/p>\n

Overall:<\/p>\n

I burned\u2026<\/p>\n

572.190 total calories<\/p>\n

244.614 fat calories<\/p>\n

327.576 carbohydrate calories<\/p>\n

The third workout that was done was a 5k, where I was trying to achieve my best time. The majority of this workout was in zone four and zone five, with limited time in the other zones. This was approximately a half hour workout but I have used the data to make it equivalent to the previous two workouts. This was done by using the zone percentages. This would simulate an hour of hard running.<\/p>\n

Overall:<\/p>\n

I burned\u2026<\/p>\n

629.992 calories<\/p>\n

127.366 fat calories<\/p>\n

502.626 carbohydrate calories<\/p>\n

From these three workouts, we saw that I burned the most calories during a 5k, however, the majority of the calories that I burned were carbohydrates. If the majority of your daily intake is not carbohydrates then this workout is not beneficial to you unless you are looking to develop your upper limit capabilities or improve your max V02. This was my biggest mistake. I was always working out at full power. I was actually burning mostly carbohydrates, when really I wasn\u2019t consuming a vast majority of carbohydrates. I have learned to lower my training level, to allow for more fat burning. After seeing the results from different workouts, it changed everything for me. I began doing several interval workouts, per week, while alternating them with pure fat burn sessions and a once a week 5k to improve my cardio ability. This seemed to work very well for me.<\/p>\n

So how do you understand your heart rate zones?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I know at the gyms they often have a chart, based off of your age, that outlines the zones. Sometimes they even have a chart like I’ve shown above, where you are left to assume what it means. Many pieces of cardio equipment also offer similar charts. Can you trust them? Not really, they are just built on a template. You also can’t trust the equipment you’re using to tell you your real heart rate. I had one tell me once that my heart rate was 260. I probably would have been dead if that were real. Now, I will outline several methods for calculating these zones, theoretically. Some are better than others. I will use these methods to compare them to my real AMA, after describing them.<\/p>\n

Method 1 \u2013 Calculations based off of Max Heart Rate (MHR)<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are three methods for making a calculation for maximum heart rate.<\/p>\n