Well this is one of those really annoying things that I end up explaining a lot to people.

The ‘fat burning zone’, as is labelled on many cardio vascular machines, is supposedly the zone in which you burn more fat.

Strictly speaking the charts are right but they are also so very, very wrong. The fat burning zone on these charts relates to a percentage of maximal heart rate. These heart rate percentages are in turn based upon laboratory measures of the best level of exercise to burn the most amount of fat as a percentage.

Let’s start with the first problem. The % of heart rate that they recommend it based upon a prediction of your max heart rate. For this they use a very simple equation that your max heart rate is 220 minus your age. That would make my max heart rate 184 beats per min, yet just last week I got my heart rate up to 198 beats per minute. I don’t fit that projection. Therefore the prescribed heart rate level for my best fat loss percentage would be wrong.

It’s not just me, back when I was doing my thesis for my undergraduate degree, I studied 10 women in a raft of tests. Most noticeable was the heart rate differences but a prime example was the difference between two women of the same age.

They were both only 19 years old , so had a predicted max of 201, yet when I got them running to complete exhaustion (VO2 max test on treadmill) one peaked at 216 and the other at only 176 (and she puked in the face mask and collection apparatus (nasty clean up job).

So you can see heart rate can be hugely variable.

Secondly and most importantly the fat burning zone is a complete waste of time. I’ll show you why with a little maths…stick with me.

Let’s say you walk on the treadmill for an hour (in your fat burning zone) and you manage to burn 400 calories of which 70% were fat, you would have you burnt 280 calories of fat.

Then imagine you were to run fast (as fast as you could) for an hour on a treadmill and burnt 1200 calories, of which only 30% were made up of fat…you still burnt 360 calories of fat.

That’s 80 calories more fat, plus a whole heap more to boot!

So that’s it really, the fat burning zone is only good when viewed as a percentage not as a total amount of calories.

It’s like the old story about how survey groups used to confuse you with percentages i.e. 80% of users found that they had good results…what they didn’t tell you was that only 5 people were survey!!

We only care about total calories not percentages…the body burns calories not a percentage of those calories!

–This is an excerpt from my Fat Burn In 30 program designed for people who only have 30 minutes a day to exercise and want to lose fat.  The next course will be starting very soon, if you are interested get over to www.FatBurnIn30.com where you can get on the early notification list.

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I went to see the knee surgeon Mr John Hardy yesterday for the two week post op consultation. He removed the stitches and we were both extremely happy with the results considering only two weeks had passed.

I have excellent range of motion and great quad tone. I have a little swelling in the knee still but that’s to be expected since I have been trying to stay active and doing as much rehab as possible.

I warmed up with a cross train for five minutes in my Fat Burn In 30 workout.

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