Body Fat and Carbohydrate Energy

Today I learned some new things about exercise that I wasn't entirely aware of.

Firstly, it doesn't matter if you do slower exercise or intense exercise, what matters is how long you exercise for. The first twenty minutes of your workout doesn't burn any stored fat in the body. It burns the carbohydrates that you ate before hand because that is the short term energy that you have supplied your body with. The body only starts to break down fat to be used as energy when it senses that you are going to run out out of short term energy.

The longer you exercise at a regular pace, the more stored fat your body will burn in an effort to reserve your short term energy for later. The body uses a combination of stored fat and carbohydrates as energy, so you're never burning one or the other.

Today I was at the gym for an hour and burned 500 calories. I'm pretty stoked on that. I like using this cool glider type machine. It feels like I'm peddling, but I'm standing up. When I increase the resistance, I can I really feel my heart rate going.

At first I was concerned that my heart rate was constantly too high and I wasn't burning any body fat, just calories. Then I came online and read all about it. You still burn body fat eventually, no matter what your heart rate is, it just depends on how long you exercise for and ultimately, how many calories you burn. When your heart rate is really high, your body uses a higher ratio of carbohydrate energy vs body fat energy, but you burn more calories from fat.

When your heart rate is lower, your body will start to burn more body fat instead of carbs in order to save your carbs for energy later, but then you burn less calories and have to exercise for twice or three times as long to burn the same amount of calories.

I think I'm going to just stop analyzing this and work out for as long and as hard as I can, as often as I can.