body fat & calories

Soldato
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I've just got home from my weekly cardio session in the gym, after seeing I burnt off 700 calories it got me thinking (I know i've been warned before about that :p). How much body fat does that actually equate to, so for every inch of body fat I have how many calories are we talking about ?

MW
 
there are 3500 calories in a pound of body fat.

when you exercise you don't just burn fat, its protein and carb's too. so 1000 cal's burnt isn't 1000 cal's of only fat.
 
every lb of body fat is equal to 3500kcals although all of the kcals you burn wont have come from fat
Edit too slow coming from my phone :(
 
quick answer: yes, there is an order.

Long answer: to find out your order you need to have tests done
 
It depends a lot on what zone you are training in. Aerobic will burn off a higher percentage of fat than anaerobic

Not strictly true. HIIT and resistance training are both exceptionally effect for reducing bf, and primarily anaerobic.

Steady state cardio hasn't been viewed as the best form of bf reduction in quite some time :)

And you're primarily utilising glycogen, then BCAAs and fats when training. The best time to burn fat is at rest, especially when sleeping, which is again why explosive, anaerobic activity can be so effective.

Ant :cool:
 
So from all that the bottom line is, it's complicated :D.

Simplistic view would be that if you are doing steady state cardio then you will burn fat after your glycogen reserves stored in your muscles are exhausted. It takes time and / or intensity to do this. The body will usually switch to fat burning around 20-30 minutes after you have started if you are in the aerobic depending on your glycogen reserves. From that 20-30minute mark you should start counting if you wish to as this is going to be a more accurate figure (yeah, yeah I know, it is hard to type that where machines are concerned with a straight face) of fat burned.

Remember the machine is making an aproximate guess based on the amount of effort put in over the time period. If the machine does not know your weight / height / body composition (% fat, % muscle and % structure) then it is really just a very rough guess.

Last time I did SSC I felt the kick in of the alternative energy source (hopefully stored fat) after around 20 minutes. The muscles were pretty exhaused before starting after a heavy weights session the previous day and the first 20 minutes had me fighting with myself to push on and not stop. 20 minutes in suddenly the aches stopped and I was able to complete the full hour with not so much difficulty apart from the boredom of cardio on a cross trainer.

As Wanton stated though. SSC is not currently considered the best way to burn fat. Lookup HIIT or just HIT for interval training (running up and down hills simulation) if you want a more efficent way to burn fat although it is more difficult.

Cheers
RB
 
If you assume that a gram of fat contains 9 calories then 700 calories would equate to about 77.7 gms of fat = but its not as simple as this.
In any case, how can you be sure you burned 700 calories?
 
Don't mean to **** on your chips but I've found CV equipment to over-estimate the amount of calories burned. Either that or my polar HRM was under calculating by 100. Treadmil = 500, HRM = 400. Still calories burned :)
 
the main thing for machine counters is that you can use them to gauge progress.
thats all.
 
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