There is a connection between decreasing body fat and having more energy, and that is through training your systems of metabolism.
Metabolism is the process of either breaking down or building up cells. Breaking down is usually considered good when it means using food for energy or decreasing body fat. It’s usually considered bad when it means decreasing muscle and bone minerals. Building up that is usually considered good would be increasing muscle or nerve cell size. Building up that is often considered bad would be fat storage. Of course there are exceptions to all of this because metabolism is not good or bad, it is just continually breaking things down and building them up so that we can be alive.
The energy systems (or the systems of metabolism) include the cell processes, the storage and breakdown of fuel sources, including sugar and fat, and oxygen utilization and nutrient distribution via the cardiorespiratory system. All these things can be trained preferentially depending on how you train, but they are all trained by having an elevated heart rate.
You don’t have to know what your heart rate is or track it unless you want to, because your rate of perceived exertion is a stand in for your heart rate. Your rate of perceived exertion (how hard it feels like you’re working) can even be a more accurate indicator of how hard you’re working than your heart rate is.
The trouble is that a lot of people really don’t like the feeling of having an elevated heart rate. We can experience a pretty strong feeling of aversion to transitioning from a “normal” feeling state, into the state where we start to feel our heart and pulse pounding, our breath coming faster and ourselves starting to feel warm and sweaty.
It’s not unusual to feel this aversion, but it is worth taking a closer look at, because training your metabolic systems will be very beneficial to your long term health, and particularly useful if you have goals to decrease body fat and increase your overall energy level.
Outside of a workout, the other time we’re likely to feel those same uncomfortable physical feelings is when we’re experiencing stress, trauma or panic.
This excerpt from an article by Harvard Health describes the stress response:
“The heart beats faster than normal, pushing blood to the muscles, heart, and other vital organs. Pulse rate and blood pressure go up. The person undergoing these changes also starts to breathe more rapidly.”
It may be that the only association we have to a pounding heart is negative.
Sometimes when we’ve had either a very intense or an ongoing stressor, the memory of it stays in our body and in our nervous system for a very long time. Although we can deliberately and gradually adjust these associations.
I used to have a hard time getting through the warm up, the part of the workout where you transition yourself from sedentary to getting your blood flowing and being prepared to move. The feeling of aversion would come up and my mind would start trying to talk me out of it. If you don’t know the feeling then maybe you’ve stood on a bridge or a cliff with a river below you, with the intent to jump off (all in the name of fun) or done something else equally frightening. As you look down into the water your survival instincts kick in, your mind gets sharper, your brain tries to talk some sense into you, and your heart, of course, starts pounding.
I’ve found in such situations that the only way to jump is to turn my brain off and just make my muscles work.
I’ve used that strategy for the warm up too. Just start jumping and lunging until I get past the state change.
I think there are probably kinder ways to do this. I’m sure the work I did with a Somatic Experiencing practitioner also helped me feel better about what I was feeling in my body.
After a while I learned that my body is just fine with an elevated heart rate. I even learned that on the days when my warm up didn’t elevate my heart rate I didn’t have as good of performance in the rest of the workout.
Since I was persistent about working hard enough to have an elevated heart and respiratory rate, the way this translated into having increased energy was also rather shocking. I was skate skiing and realized I hadn’t needed to stop for a breather. That really delighted me.
I also noticed that over time I could look forward to continuous movement and feel that the challenge it created actually felt good to me.
Cardio isn’t just about your heart and circulatory system. It’s also not just about efficient oxygen exchange in your lungs. It actually has an effect on how your body breaks down fat and other nutrients to provide you with energy. The changes happen all the way at the cellular level in your muscle fibers as the little energy producing cell bits (called mitochondria) become more abundant, making your body more efficient at breaking down nutrients and converting them to energy.
Having better gas (oxygen/carbon dioxide) exchange in the lungs and more efficiency at breaking down and converting nutrients leads to having increased energy, both in short bursts and for longer durations.
Which is why some prefer the term metabolic conditioning (or MetCon for short) rather than cardio, because you’re training your body’s energy systems, not just your heart and arteries.
These metabolic benefits occur with all exercise that elevates the respiratory rate, not just exercises that are traditionally thought of as cardio exercises. The trick to getting an elevated respiratory rate is to use larger muscle groups and to use them at either a near maximal effort or to attempt to use them quickly (though safely).
What I hoped to do with this article is to draw the connection between heart and respiratory rate, nutrient utilization and thus fat loss, and how these things affect your day to day physical energy, as well as your ability to maintain effort for longer periods of time. But also to bring in some empathy for the fact that “cardio” mirrors a really unpleasant stress response. If you do have an aversion to the feeling, it is not just something about how you’re built that is set in stone. It’s yet another way we express our individual variations, and it’s something that you can get curious about and experiment with…with compassion.
by Heart Light Digital