Most workouts or gyms will take you through a rigorous routine like HIT (High-Intensity Training) and HIIT (High-Intensity Interval Training) or put you on a Treadmill or Elliptic when you say you want to lose weight.
Let's look at what happens when you take part in a HIT or HIIT or Cardio workouts. When we training, our muscles need oxygen. Our body has two ways to get oxygen to a muscle – Aerobic Respiration and Anaerobic Respiration.
Without going deep into specifics and accurate details here is the gist of the matter:
ATP is the purest form of energy our body needs. Our body obtains this by synthesizing Glucose which is in turn obtained from the food we eat. Any excess energy not required is stored as fat in the body—biology 1-0-1.
During a HIT/HIIT, what burns first is ATP. An then the body consumes Glucose. But given the short workout interval and anaerobic respiration of muscles during HIT/HIIT the body will never get a chance to burn the fat. Instead, it consumes the most important APT and Glucose. It is the reason why most of us may feel too tired after HIT/HIIT. Some may even take a couple of days to recover from it, depending on how much time the body takes to replenish the spent ATP and Glucose. Infact, depending on what we eat immediately after the workout, you may put on weight / Fat because our body assumes it is in dire need of energy and may end up storing more calories than spent. So, especially, avoid consuming high sugar foods immediately after HIT/HIIT.
So how do we know how to burn the fat, lose inches and convert it into muscle?
That's the next lesson!