Burning fat or burning muscle?

T

The Red

0
I'm hoping someone can help me understand the concept of fat burning vs. burning muscle mass, or direct me to a good article that might explain it. I've read a bit about it but am still kind of confused.
How can you be sure during cardio your body is burning fat rather than muscle? Are your fat stores used before muscle is? or does it depend on the amount of carbs available to the body?
 
It is not possible to guarantee what will be burned during exercise. In most individuals it is more likely muscle will be burned during exercise and fat will be burned after exercsie, during the recovery period, especially if the exercise is short duration, high intensity like sprints or weightlifting. The phenomena of increased metabolism after exercise is called EPOC (exercise post oxygen consumption). The best way to keep muscle, while burning fat is to reduce your calorie intake below your maintenance level while lifting heavy weights. Reducing calories tells your body to loose, while lifting heavy weights tells it to maintian as much muscle as possible. Browse around this forum. There are a lot more details in the stickies.
 
In my understanding, doing cardio causes you to lose muscle during the activity. In all, doing 20 minutes of cardio a day is good, and generally speaking, doing excess of 60 minutes of cardio will cause you to lose muscles.

So if you're only doing 20 minutes of cardio, you shouldn't have to worry about losing muscles. Generally speaking, you should also do weight lifting to prevent any further muscle lost as well as keeping a good intake of protein.
 
If your diet/training is dialed in correctly you should rest assure that little, if any, muscle will be lost during a period of fat loss.
 
Know body fat percentage first

The Red - maybe it would help to understand body fat before coming up with an exercise plan. I recently came across a couple There's a lot of good iinformation on this site and found myself reading many of the more general articles on health and fitness as well. Hope this helps.
 
~LV~ said:
If your diet/training is dialed in correctly you should rest assure that little, if any, muscle will be lost during a period of fat loss.
Click to expand...

I agree, When doing cardio its usually only after prolonged stress in which the hormone cortisol is released, usually after an hour i beleive, then protein degradation begins. It makes sense considering protein is important compared to fat which is primaraly stored for energy.
 
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