I'm 48 year old male... when I do cardio at 138-140 area for 60min...I sweat but no big deal... Today I did 30 min at the 138-140 area and the another 30min at 145-148 area... This felt much better as a workout and I felt like I lost fat..and felt hungry till noon even with a Protein shake..Oatmeal and Grapefruit breakfast... I just felt thinner :)..

Was this to much for me to lose fat ? because my goal is to lose the fat and keep the muscle

I'm 48 year old male... when I do cardio at 138-140 area for 60min...I sweat but no big deal... Today I did 30 min at the 138-140 area and the another 30min at 145-148 area... This felt much better as a workout and I felt like I lost fat..and felt hungry till noon even with a Protein shake..Oatmeal and Grapefruit breakfast... I just felt thinner :)..

Was this to much for me to lose fat ?


edit: wait that seems like too much. you just need one 45 minute session at that heart rate for liss.


2 sessions of 30 minutes... depending on when you do um... is risky.
but who knows.


just make sure your diet can afford it.... thats important.

I did 60min.... 30 138-140bpm and took it up to 145-148bpm for another 30min... I felt great after...actual felt like a workout :)

yeah... if your loosing fat and not much muslce... or gaining a little muscle...then by all means keep it up... but if your loosing too much muscle like that... id cut it shorter.

diet is the most imporant element though. if you like to continue working out like that... make sure your diet can support it... or else your body might hit starvation mode/plateu quick.


45 minutes- 50min fasted LISS a day is good enough for me... but my caloric level and diet is proportioned for it.


if you cant tweak your diet to where it works for you or you dont know much about how to manage your diet around your workouts.... i dont think you should concern yourself with 2 30 minute sessions.... top priority here is diet... always should be.

Thanks..I've just started the BFFM and I'm following Tom's advise..on diet ..workouts etc..,
I'm watching my body changes to see if I'm losing muscle.. but this morning was the first time in two weeks I decided to kick it up a notch :)..

cool deal man... good luck. i can not stress enough how important diet is to get the body you want.... so i wanted to make sure that got thru before anything else. sounds like you are headed to your goal!

Second morning of doing 60 min. cardio at: 45min of 145-147bpm and 15min at 157-160bpm

I swear I could feel the fat come off :)... Of course it was only water ..but it gives you a goal...the feeling..

I'm 48 year old male... when I do cardio at 138-140 area for 60min...I sweat but no big deal... Today I did 30 min at the 138-140 area and the another 30min at 145-148 area... This felt much better as a workout and I felt like I lost fat

If you aren't huffing and puffing, then you are probably doing no damage to muscles.

Now if you are trying to "feel" the fat loss, then you really have to go a lot longer. If you do 1200 calories an hour - that is really busting it by the way - then you have to do three hours to lose a pound of fat. Which is like half of one percent of your body weight. Imperceptible against the background of all the other stuff you would feel from putting out 1200 calories an hour for three hours.

You can't really go by beat rate alone. In fact you really don't care about the heart rate for calorie counting - you care about the VO2max and what %VO2max you were working at. Heart rate is just a convenient thing to approximate that with. And to do that approximation you need to know the maximum heart rate (MHR). There are various formulas for MHR as a function of age, but they are not accurate enough to really plan an exercise program by. For example, I'm 46 and a pretty good age formula (http://www.brianmac.demon.co.uk/maxhr.htm) tells me 178 bpm. But my ventilation threshold (VT) is about 174 these days. I can work out at just about 180 for at least twenty minutes. I can definitely hit 185 while running on a treadmill, and don't know how much higher I could go (because I don't have a defibrillator in my gym bag). But 178 isn't the MHR for me.

Like they say on that page: "Elite endurance athletes and moderately trained individuals will have a MHR 3 or 4 beats slower than a sedentary individual. It was also found that well trained over 50s are likely to have a higher MHR than that which is average for their age."

OK I'm definitely at least moderately trained, and probably well trained, but not quite over 50. So do I correct downward for being moderately trained? Or upward for being almost 50?

It's tricky to actually know your MHR. So don't rely too heavily on it.

The only really easy to measure things in this picture are the resting heart rate (which you want to make go down with training) and the ventilation threshold, (which you want to make go up with training).

The VT is somewhere around 85% to 95% MHR. So it's a good marker for "hard work". It also has the benefit of automatically going up as you train, so if you train at or near the VT, then you will automatically increase the intensity of the workout to track your progress. (Just like weights - as you get stronger, you need to increase intensity to make progress.)

If you want to do an easy fat-burn only workout, then halfway between the VT and resting heart rate is a little low, and 80 percent of the way from the resting rate to the VT is a little high. So I would say the range from 60%-70% of the way from resting to VT is a nice place for easy cardio.

In truth, you don't want to do cardio work out at a single fixed intensity. Just like training muscles against different resistance on different weeks, you want to work the heart at different intensities. One reason for this is that the stroke of the heart changes a little as you work harder and you want to strengthen the heart through it's entire range of motion.

Interval training is another way to improve your cardiac capacity, and work your heart through a range of rates. The thing that you need to think about with intervals is that the total calorie expenditure might not be as much as the same time of hard cardio. That's a time management issue.

Very good points :).. I do feel I could've had a conversation with no problem.. that is one of the ways I watch myself ... Also I won't take it to the huffing and puffing level..until I'm sure I'm in top shape.. I don't want t o embarass myself by hitting the floor :) lol

I use the HR/bpm just as a guide line but I mainly try to stay in tune what my body is saying.. and trust me if it said this was alittle to much today..I would adjust my next workout.. As much as I feel I'm in pretty good shape or at least I have a good concentration level when I workout ..I know that I haven't worked out in 10 months.. So I'm taking it slow and easy at first

I don't run :)...with my weight at 210 I feel like I'm abusing myself to much in running ..plus I can get a good cardio workout without banging up my legs.. plus every runner I've seen that does it daily looks like a tooth pick..and no muscle tone :) That ain't my goal

yeah... if your loosing fat and not much muslce... or gaining a little muscle...then by all means keep it up... but if your loosing too much muscle like that... id cut it shorter.

diet is the most imporant element though. if you like to continue working out like that... make sure your diet can support it... or else your body might hit starvation mode/plateu quick.


45 minutes- 50min fasted LISS a day is good enough for me... but my caloric level and diet is proportioned for it.


if you cant tweak your diet to where it works for you or you dont know much about how to manage your diet around your workouts.... i dont think you should concern yourself with 2 30 minute sessions.... top priority here is diet... always should be.

So krosspyder, you onlydo liss instead of hitt? So what should my heartrate be for burning fat doing liss??? Is it 70 percent mhr or what?