Is exercising on an empty stomach harmful to your health?
People often worry that exercising on an empty stomach will cause hypoglycemia due to the large consumption of glycogen stored in the body, resulting in symptoms such as dizziness, weakness, and palpitations, which are detrimental to health.
However, if the amount of exercise is appropriate and the energy consumption is low, the energy stored in the body is sufficient for use and will not affect health.
Studies suggest that moderate exercise 1-2 hours before meals (i.e., on an empty stomach), such as walking, dancing, jogging, or cycling, can help with weight loss. This is because no new fatty acids enter fat cells at this time, making it easier to burn excess fat (especially postpartum fat), resulting in better weight loss than exercising after meals.
Is higher exercise intensity always better?
Some obese individuals are full of confidence when they first start bodybuilding training. They train for four hours instead of the prescribed two hours. However, after a few days, they will feel depressed, listless, and exhausted after only a short time. This is caused by overtraining. If no measures are taken in time and the situation continues as before, the symptoms will worsen and may even lead to chronic fatigue, making it impossible to train normally.
In fact, only sustained low-intensity aerobic exercise can help you burn excess fat. Increasing the intensity of exercise is actually detrimental. Therefore, easy, gentle, long-duration low-intensity exercise or long-duration exercise with a heart rate maintained at 100-124 beats per minute is most beneficial for weight loss.
Is it better to exercise in the morning or at night to lose weight?
When it comes to exercise for weight loss, almost everyone chooses to exercise in the morning, believing that not only is the air fresh in the morning, but also that after a night’s rest, people have more energy and are more likely to achieve better weight loss results.
Actually, the above statement is incorrect. Aside from the fact that morning air humidity is high and contains more harmful particulate matter, which is detrimental to health, and that blood sugar levels are generally lower in the morning, making exercise less effective, the choice to exercise in the evening makes sense from the perspective of fat formation. Firstly, most body fat is formed at night. Exercising in the evening allows the body to burn off excess calories. Otherwise, after a night of activity, fat will accumulate, leading to weight gain over time. Therefore, experts believe the ideal time for exercise is from 4 PM to 9 PM, with 7 PM to 9 PM being the optimal time.
Exercising in the evening not only burns the energy consumed that day, but also utilizes stored body fat, so the effect of exercising in the morning is far less than that of exercising in the evening.
