Exercise Metabolic Rate

I recently had an eye-opening assessment done at Lifetime Fitness, the exercise metabolic rate assessment.  

This assessment is designed to educate me on how my body responds to my cardio workouts. The results tell me how many calories I am burning (fat and carb), as well as what my VO2 levels are (how much oxygen is being consumed by my cells). With this information I should be able to create better workouts geared specifically for me.

Sorry ladies, this IS NOT me.

To have this assessment done, I had to strap a breathing mask to my face and connect it to a machine. Then I had to run on a treadmill while the assessor increased the speed and incline in measured increments.

When I first put on the mask, I felt like an astronaut training for a great Mars mission. After a few minutes, I was sounding like Darth Vader with asthma and wishing I had brushed my teeth better before coming to the gym. Eventually I got used the feel of the mask and the “not as fresh as would have liked” breath and was able to get into a good jogging zone until the end of the assessment.

The results can be seen below.

I found many things intriguing about these results. First and foremost, I was amazed at how inefficiently my body is in Zones 1 and 2. I had figured that with all my long slow distance training I would have been rocking these zones. But as you can see, this is not even close to reality.

Another thing that I was not aware of was the relationship between training zones and percentage of fat-vs-carbs calories that are burned. I have always figured that "calories were calories" and as long as I was burning a lot of them it didn't matter what zone I was training in. As this assessment (and my persistent love handles) show, I was sadly mistaken. By training so much in Zone 3, I have been burning mostly carbs while the cookies and caramel mocha’s have been making themselves right at home around my waistline.

I am willing to admit that I was wrong, and I am always willing to adapt my training, so I asked my assessor what I should be differently. The first thing she told me was that I need to be 100% efficient in Zone 1 and close to that in Zone 2.

“How do I do that?” I asked.

“Slow down!” was her sage advice. 

Advice I took to heart. Since I just happened to be in my off-season training period, I have worn my heart rate monitor on every run and bike, making sure I never reached Zone 3. I'm not sure how I'm doing but I'll be going back for another assessment next month and I'll let you know how I do.

If any of you have the opportunity to have this assessment done, I HIGHLY recommend it. It can be a great tool for your training.