hannukah harry

Yes, that is efficiency. I didn’t say it wasn’t. I said that your body does not process fat better, contradicting your statement that it does. Exercise makes your body work more efficiently. But it doesn’t “process fat better.” Let me make an analogy. If a widget company manages to produce 10% more widgets in March than in January is it because they spent February enlarging the plant and adding workers or did their January workers start to work more efficiently? If they enlarged the plant and got more workers, that’s not an increase in efficiency. If every worker in January made 10 widgets a day and all of the workers in March also made 10 widgets a day, then they must’ve added 10% more workers for the increase. The did not become 10% more efficient. End analogy. The transportation of the nutrients and waste products by the cardiovascular system does become more efficient.


After reading the Mark Allen link, I’d have to say he doesn’t really understand much about what he’s talking about. He’s a great athlete, but doesn’t seem to understand how the body works. That’s not really surprising though, there are a lot of myths about exercise floating about because a lot of bodybuilders, while they look like they’d know what they’re talking about, really don’t.

Right there is when you can stop reading. There is no single most valuable tool you can have for exercise. HRM’s are good because you can monitor and track how you’ve improved. After 6 months of running with one, you can see how much lower your HR is when you run 4 miles at an x mph pace. It can also help you in that there are days where you’re really pushing yourself while exercising but performing horribly. Is your heart rate just not up to where it should be? Is it a mental problem? Is it just “one of those days”? A HRM can help you figure that out. But you can also, generally, tell where you are by how difficult it feels. You don’t the good objective info about where your HR was and the average for the workout, etc., but it isn’t a necessary piece of equipment. Good shoes are 10x more important than a HR monitor. Proper nutrition is more important than a HR monitor.

Overtraining. If you read the rest of the article, no where does he mention that was the problem.

Eh. Your body is never in a “chemistry that only burns” carbs. If you hooked yourself up to a gas spirometer and did a maxVO2 test, you’d find that until you got to about 97-98% of your maxHR, you’d still be burning some fats. Mark Allen’s problem was that his workouts did much more towards making his heart stronger while not actually increasing the efficiency of his blood vessel network. It’s a lot like an airport increasing the number of flights it has coming in and out each day, but not building any extra hubs or runways. (It’s the same principle as when you lift weights and do high weight/low reps vs. low weight/high reps.)

This is the second or third time he’s said something in this article that makes me think he’s leaving details out. Mark Allen might know a bit about exercise physiology, might not, but he says some things that make me think he’s leaving info out. Like how did his buddy come up with the 155bpm? Did his friend put him on a treadmill and test his VO2? That’s probably my biggest problem with this article.

His body could utilize fat for fuel (or else he’d be dead), it just wasn’t trained to do it efficiently for long periods of time (ie. He did not train his body to more efficiently bring nutrients and waste to and from his exercising muscle cells. Depending on his entire exercise regimen, he may or may not have had a sufficient number of mitochondria to provide the energy he needed for endurance exercise). But I really dislike hyperbole like his statement that his body couldn’t utilize fat.

I have to temporarily call bullshit on his equation. At least in your link to the Lifetime Fitness chart, they mention it is only an estimate. Mark Allen doesn’t feel the need to. Also, the aneorbic/lactate threshold isn’t the spot where you can still burn fat as the main energy source. It’s the spot where the lactate buildup in your cells is greater than the export. It’s the point where your muscles can’t clear the lactate out of your cells fast enough and it starts to accumulate, making it more difficult for your muscles to function properly. Anyways, if you want to properly find your threshold, you can get a gas analysis (which if you notice on the Lifetime chart, it mentions that) or you can go based on a few days workouts and noting where your HR is when your run starts to get hard (when you “hit the wall”). Using an arbitrary formula won’t really tell you shit. I’d need to see how they got the formula that they use in order to consider changing my mind on that.

As someone (sorry, I’m typing this at work without an internet connection and forgot who posted it) showed in the link on HIIT, studies have shown that HIIT actually more fat loss than a slower paced long session of cardio. And the big reason? When you burn fat as your primary fuel in exercise, you’re working at level where you burn fewer calories total. It doesn’t matter if you exercise and burn 100 calories from fat or 100 calories from carbs, either way, you’ve burnt those calories and they’re gone. To lose weight you need a calorie deficeit. HIIT will cause a bigger one. So if you spend an hour a day running at a slower “fat burning” pace, you’ll end up losing less weight than if you mixed HIIT in there. Mark Allen’s biggest problem with his training was that he only worked as hard as he could. No professional athelete does that. They’ll have days where they work at 95% of their maxHR, and they’ll follow those days with working at 45% of their maxHR (actually, most probably use their HRR these days, it’s a better method). He was overtraining, which would make it so that his body could not recover fast enough to keep up with what he wanted to do, so he wasn’t able to adapt and get the benefits of his exercise. Slowing down is what helped him. A good exercise program, whether for training/competition or for weight loss/health should include both. I bet if he had trained that way from the beginning he would have found success in triathalons much sooner than he did.

Oh, and his “No Pain No Gain” credo is BS.

And… thingstodo, at the end of this post I’m responding to you said…

There are very few situations where your body does not burn both fat and sugers. When you sleep, you’re body is burning nearly 100% fat. When you’re just sitting on the couch watching TV, you’ll be burning a little more suger, but not much. When you’re working all out at your maxHR, you’ll hit 99-100% suger. Otherwise, there’s always some mix of what’s being burnt.

Now on to your second post…

This is just plain incorrect. Use the real definition, not your own. The more highly trained you are, the higher % of your maxHR you’ll be able to achieve and still be under your lactate threshold. Someone who’s very out of shape will have a much lower lactate threshold than a highly trained athlete. Exercise is never a matter of absolutes. It is always relative to the individual. Most people, including recreational altheletes, could not exercise above 80% of their maxHR for a very long time. Go to any gym in the country, I’d wager that maybe 40% would have a lactate threshold above 80% of their maxHR. The rest would probably find that 80% would tire them out really quickly. And then there’s all the people in this country who don’t work out…

warm-up and cool-down should always be considered separate from the actual exercise time. You need to spend about 20 – 30 minutes minimally to really get benefits out of a lower intensity cardio workout. The longer you work out, the better the benefits. But you don’t even need to do the workout all at one time. If you spend 30 minutes/day in your target HR range, even if it’s broken up into three 10 minutes sessions, you’ll end up getting benefits from it.


when you do the high endurance stuff, you don’t need to 10-12 minutes of a 60 minute workout. If you do 60 minutes total, you may very well end up overtraining (depends on your fitness level). A good interval training session could be done in 30 minutes.

Of course you have to wait to the end to say this! Hehe. My reading ahead might’ve helped…

Oh, and sorry about the length, I know I can be a bit long winded at times (especially when it’s a matter of something I know a lot about). And I’m bored at work, had to find something to do.

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shabbat shalom, mother fucker! - the hebrew hammer