Following a keto diet can burn pounds of unwanted fat, while training your body to burn fat as fuel.
But if you’re doing aerobic exercise, you might not get the health and weight-loss benefits you want.
Especially if you’re a keto novice, cardio will knock you out of ketosis!
This is the desired metabolic state where you’re burning fat for fuel.
And if you’ve been doing keto for a while, cardio will keep you from getting into ketosis.
Here’s what happens when you do a lower intensity, long-duration cardio workout — like jogging or using the elliptical…
For the first five or so minutes, you burn carbs.
But then your body switches metabolic gears and begins to burn fat while you’re working out.
As a regular reader, you know I recommend working out in short bursts of intense exertion… followed by periods of rest and recovery. You increase your intensity with every set.
This is the foundation of my PACE program.
When you exercise in short bursts this way, you burn much more fat during the recovery period… AFTER you stop exercising.
When you do this repeatedly, your body learns that it needs more energy stored in muscle for fast access.
You also teach your body that storing energy as fat is inefficient because you don’t work out long enough to make good use of the fat during the exercise.
Take PACE to the Pool
The great thing about PACE is that you can use any kind of exertion to do it. Since it’s summer, a lot of you are spending more time in the water.
So use PACE to swim laps. But… instead of focusing on how many laps you complete, challenge your body in different ways:
- First, just swim a few laps for each of three sets. Swim the first laps a bit faster than you normally do. Then rest until your heart rate returns to normal.
- Next, swim a set just a bit faster. Now rest again but make the rest a tiny bit shorter.
- Then swim another few laps. For this set, either go a tiny bit faster than the last set, or swim a few more laps.
If you want to learn some other good PACE exercises, go to my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/AlSearsMD/videos.
I have more than 30 different exercises and a complete workout to help you get started.
More than 20 studies prove that it’s a safe and effective way to lose weight and gain health…
Like helping to lower blood sugar levels and reducing the risk of heart disease.1,2
To Your Good Health,
Al Sears, MD, CNS
1. Gögebakan O, et al. “Effects of weight loss and long-term weight maintenance with diets varying in protein and glycemic index on cardiovascular risk factors: The diet, obesity, and genes (DiOGenes) study: A randomized, controlled trial.” Circulation. 2011;124(25):2829-2838.
2. Thomas D and Elliott EJ. “Low glycaemia index, or low glycaemic load, diets for diabetes mellitus.” Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2009;(1):CD006296.