I want to help you understand how low intensity steady state cardio / LISS cardio burns fat. It is not bad it is just a little bit slower at burning fat. Normally when we are doing steady-state cardio, our bodies are in a very efficient state. It is something called beta-oxidation. It is a very efficient form of breaking down fats into energy. But efficiency is not always what we want. When we are trying to burn fat, we don’t want the most efficient way to create energy, we actually want an inefficient way because that causes our bodies to have to adapt and thereby burn more fat, more calories, and ultimately lose weight. However, beta-oxidation in the utilization of fats is a very phenomenal, very interesting thing and it does a lot for our bodies. Let us explain how it actually works.
Beta oxidation is simply where fatty acids are broken down into the mitochondria and ultimately broken down into coenzymes which we can ultimately use for energy. Coenzyme a is the root of creating energy in general. Let us explain here how fatty acids are transported and how this process works. It starts with a fatty acid; a fatty acid molecule that comes from dietary fats or whatever the case may be; these fatty acids conjugate with coenzymes in a way that is called, cytosol. The cytosol is just the aqueous portion of a cell.
If you visualize a cell and you look at a diagram of a cell, you will see that there is a liquid portion in the center of the cell that is the cytosol so what happens is the fatty acid conjugates with coenzyme and it creates something known as fatty acid acyl-coenzyme. This fatty acid acyl-coenzyme is then modified by something that a lot of us know as carnitine. Maybe you have taken the L carnitine supplement. You have just believed that Low-Intensity Steady State Cardio helps you burn more fat. Well, now you will probably understand how that actually works.
The L carnitine reacts with the fatty acid that has already been conjugated and it carries it into the mitochondria so this literally is a transporter to get it into the inner membrane of the mitochondria where we create energy. The mitochondria are the powerhouse of a cell where we create energy. So it goes from being inside a cell in the cytosol crossing through the membrane of the mitochondria to where it can start being utilized for energy but now we have to understand how that process actually works.
You may visualize the fatty acid breakdown like a March Madness bracket or like a sports betting bracket or something like that so you end up having this long-chain fatty acid that is inside your mitochondria and it starts breaking down. It breaks down through dehydrogenation. It means that hydrogen molecules are removed and water is added in. Then this cleaving process occurs where you have got the fatty acid that’s been modified a little bit and then a portion of it gets cleaved off.
The end of the fatty acid gets cleaved off making a shorter fatty acid. That fatty acid goes to the top of the cycle and starts the process again where hydrogens are removed, water is added and a portion cleaved off becomes even smaller and then it goes through the process again until there’s nothing left but a siedel coenzyme. When we reference it like a sports bracket it literally is like it starts as a total wide funnel at the top; breaks down more, break down more until you are left with nothing but acetyl coenzyme which is pure energy and this process is very unique it obviously involves oxidation where it requires oxygen. It requires dehydrogenase to remove hydrogen very complex process yet it yields a lot of energy.
Now we are going to explain how this works when it comes down to steady-state cardio. Many people will bag on steady-state cardio because they think you’re going to burn a lot of muscle and everything like that well the thing is steady-state cardio, which predominantly uses fats as a source of fuel. It takes a long time to create energy. It is slow, it breaks down fatty acids in a slow way but it ends up creating over 100 ATP every time it goes through this process whereas when we are utilizing carbs as a source of fuel, we are only creating 36 ATP. Now in case you do not know ATP, it literally is just another word for energy so it didn’t seem triphosphate. It is basically the root of energy in your body.
We create 100 units of energy through beta-oxidation from fat and we create 36 units of energy from ATP through glucose metabolism so by doing simple math, you can see you could potentially burn more fat because you have to work harder to create more ATP with carbohydrates. With fat as a source of fuel, your body runs efficiently so that is the caveat with low-intensity cardio.
You have a direct line to utilize fats but your body is going to utilize them a little bit slower with anaerobic activity. When you use carbs, your body is going to have to work harder. It is inefficient. It hurts more but you do burn more calories. Not necessarily more fat but more calories because you have to work harder. You have to work three times as hard so I hope that makes some sense but when you look at the big picture that is how low-intensity steady-state cardio helps you burn fat it is not a bad thing. If you go to the extreme I’m always a fan of both high intensity and LISS but it all depends on the situation!!
