Originally Posted by
crankarmbreaker
Burning fat if one keeps the effort down... how does this work? I've been trying to keep my heart rate in the "hard" zone of 151-172 bpm on the heart rate monitor. I bought that monitor a few months ago and discovered that my habits right now are to lazy around in the "fat-burning zone" of less than 137. Since then I've been making the effort to keep it in the "hard" zone as much as possible to build stamina. I would think, though, that going slower would burn less fat. Does it?
That's just in the context of learning to ride without eating. The harder you ride, the more fat you burn,
AFAIK up to the point of going anaerobic. I can ride for 2+ hours without eating, no matter how hard I go, but that's after training to do that for years. I was advising to ride moderate without food until you build an ability to do that.
Important to this discussion is the fact that the harder you ride, the more calories you burn, regardless of source. Caloric deficit is how one loses weight. However to reduce hunger during the ride and thus reduce calorie intake, it's good to train in a manner which increases the body's ability to burn fat rapidly, thus hopefully increasing the amount of fat in the mix at all effort levels and as a side benefit, making one less susceptible to, shall I say, inappropriate hunger off the bike. One of my little truisms is that our bodies are simply trainable chemical factories. They get better at doing what we train them to do - for good or ill.