Fast Weight Loss: Tapping your Intramuscular Reserves

Imagine you have just gone through an intense interval training session. The body has taken now been through a period of exercise and is now in resting. If your training was intense enough you probably used up a large amount of the energy stores from inside your muscle.

You might notice that you are still breathing a little harder than normal. After exercise people tends to use a lot more oxygen than when they are normally at rest. A reason for this oxygen is that the body is burning up energy, more specifically fat.

This is how fast weight loss works. Carbohydrate sources of glycogen (carbohydrates reserves stored in the muscle) can get used up fairly quickly in intense exercise. After the exercise the muscles find themselves depleted of energy stores. They have used up a large portion of there glycogen. These need to be replaced as soon as possible so the body starts converting all carbohydrates from the blood stream into glycogen rather than using it for energy. In simple terms, the muscle needs to refill its stockroom of energy so it starts taking the sugar out of your blood and converting into stored energy inside the muscle.

While this is going on the body still needs energy to run itself. The only area it can turn to for another source of energy is the fat supplied in the blood stream which is now readily available in an oxygen rich environment. This process is intense for about an hour after exercise, but continues for hours after the training. All this time the body is using fat which is pulled directly from our fat stores as its energy source.

This process would not really occur at low intensity levels as neither the carbohydrate stores (glycogen) or fat stores (triglyceride) inside the muscle would have been depleted. In fact the duration and intensity of this post exercise process is directly related to the intensity of the exercise and the duration it was maintained for.

This is where interval training for fast weight loss shines. The goal then will be do an intense activity which uses a large portion of muscle mass so that the largest amount of intra muscular energy stores are used up. Then these muscles are pushed into a lactic acid state for a long cumulative time to improve the lactic acid threshold and thereby increase the amount of energy that will be used up the next time exercise happens. Apart from the athletic benefits of improving this threshold it would also increase the period of fat burning in the body. This is essentially the basis of fast weight loss.