Permanent Fitness

As I wrote in one of my previous posts – exercising is essential in weight loss. I chose running as my primary exercising routine. The main reasons for that are:

• Running is simple – you don’t need too many skills to run.
• You can run anywhere – this is particularly important. I can run whether I am home, on vacation or when I travel for work purposes.
• Running is cheap – There is almost no cheapest sport on earth. All you really need are good shoes. Any other equipment is just a luxury. Apart from the shoes, you don’t need to pay for anything to anybody.
• Running is natural – there are no awkward moves as on some of the training equipment available in gyms.
• Running is a cardio exercise - cardio exercises are best when it comes to fat loss.

How long should I run?

In order to answer that question, we have to look deeper into how energy is used during running.

Our organisms store energy in two ways:

• As fat – that is the energy we want to use. We want to burn that fat. Fat, however, is a long-term storage of energy. Our bodies keep energy in form of fat as a resource for long and significant energy deficits.
• As glycogen – this is the short-term energy storage of our bodies. Glycogen is a polysaccharide (type of sugar), which is stored mainly in muscles and liver and is the first to be burned by our bodies.

So when we run, glycogen is the first to be burned. Usually it lasts for around 20 minutes. Only after that time our bodies start to really burn fat. It is estimated that during the first 20 minutes only 20% of energy comes from fat and 80% from glycogen. After about 15-20 minutes, the proportions start to change in favour of fat. It is only then that the real fat loss takes place.

In order to lose fat, one should therefore run, or do other cardio exercises, for a consecutive time which is longer than 20 minutes – that is where the golden rule of exercising for at least 30 minutes per day comes from.

You can cheat this mechanism

Yes, yes – you can cheat this mechanism and it’s really simple. The only thing you have to do is go running in the morning, before breakfast. Your body uses glycogen as its energy resource throughout the night and in the morning its stores are significantly depleted. If you run in the morning, you start burning fat almost from the very first minute

There you are – I just gave you a quick hack to get rid of fat loss

My running update

I won’t be running in the morning as that would require getting up much too early, therefore to burn fat I decided to run for 40 minutes 2-3 times a week. This gives me 20 minutes of fat loss. So far I’m not able to run for consecutive period of 40 minutes so my ‘running’ looks as follows:

• 5min of march – quick worm up march,
• 10min of a trot,
• 5min of a march,
• 5min of a trot,
• 5 min of a march,
• 3 min of a trot,
• 7 min of march – quick in the beginning but slowly decreasing – this takes the pressure off the heart which has to pump excess blood out of my legs (this blood delivers extra oxygen to muscles during the run).

That’s my drill so far – 20 minutes of slow running and 20 minutes of walking. Not too impressive so far, however, I can average around 3 miles in that time, which I think is not bad for a start. My goal, however, is to be able to run for 40 consecutive minutes without pause. To achieve that, I’ll be reducing periods of walking and increasing periods of running within the 40 minutes.

That’s it from me for today.

So tell me now – what exercises do you do to lose weight? Do you do any at all?