Breaking Down Fat.

[aj47]

Just a quickie..

When you exercise a particular part of your body, do you only break down the fat near the muscles you use, or is fat throughout your body broken down?

[Mercurial]

That depends a lot on what type of exercise you're doing, the intensity and the duration. There are a couple of websites floating around if you look em up on Google under keywords like fitness, nutrition and what not. I'll see if I can dig a few up for ya.

[tyler90012]

I remember learning this very topic in a wellness class in high school. According to my teacher then, the answer was that fat throughout your body is broken down. In other words, you cannot target a specific part of your body for fat loss by exercising that region specifically.

 

Keep in mind that I learned this in a wellness (health) class, not really a science class, so I can't vouch for the validity of the info.

[Mercurial]

Aight found two pubmed abstracts

 

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=9781322&dopt=Abstract

 

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=6571234&dopt=Abstract

 

1st one says that fat metabolism is brought in from peripheral adipose tissue to the bloodstream first, so basically that means that the fat that is metabolised is not necessarily the fat that is surrounding the muscle you're working on. The second abstract talks about varying ddegrees of carbohydrate and fat metabolism can predominate depending on how well adapted the person is to certain training in whichc ase fat metabolism increases with level of higher training. I also seem to remember somethin about carbs being metabolised at a higher rate when you're doing things such as weight lifting vs. full body work, so like doing reps of bicep curls will blatantly do nothing to decrease the amound of fat around your arms, although this isn't necessarily true for people like bodybuilders who train that way all the time and can efficiently metabolise fat that way. However, my thrid point I can't find any good online documentation on that so I could just be a jive turkey but hope this helps.