Fat Burning vs. Carb Burning?
I read about people talking about Fat burning vs. Carb burning. I am running in The Philadephia Marathon relay (6.2 mile leg) on Sunday and started to think about this topic.
How do I know if I am burning carbs or fat? How do I burn my fat stores first? Fat is what I would love to burn!!! :D
I follow the zone pretty closely. How should I tweak the zone to burn the fat stores?
you can be pretty sure that at any given moment, you're burning both--even if your carb intake is zero, you'll still be creating some glucose from carbon skeletons from amino acids, etc. in general the lower the intensity of your activity level, the greater fraction of the energy supply will be coming from fat. you can encourage more body fat burning by dropping your carb levels, but dropping it too much will limit your your high-end metabolic work. if you're running at a super easy pace, you'll be fine. but if you're pushing hard, i.e. at your VO2 max or thereabouts, you'll be burning a greater proportion of muscle/liver glycogen and any available ingested carb because it can supply more quickly. that's the whole reasoning behind the carb loading practice. so with teh zone, you can drop the carb level, up the fat blocks, but you'll probably find shooting GU or similar high GI carbs during the race will help keep your potential intensity higher.
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