Fat oxidation is a process in which the body breaks down lipids, releasing energy to fuel your performance. But why is using fat as a fuel important for endurance performance? How does your body decide to use fats rather than sugars? And how can you develop your fat oxidation capacity to boost your fuel efficiency and your power output? If you’re a coach or an athlete, this article will help you better understand how your body functions and how you can make it work even better.

In this article, we will take a dive into what fat oxidation is and how to make your body burn more fats than sugars during exercise. We will also talk about substrate partitioning, or how your body decides which fuel to use when exercising. Finally, we will look at different types of training interventions and what their actual effects are on fat utilisation.

Let’s dive in!

Fat Oxidation During Exercise & Endurance Performance
First, let’s understand how your endurance performance will be impacted by fat oxidation.

During exercise, your body mainly uses sugars, fats together with oxygen in order to recycle the ATP that is being broken down. ATP stands for Adenosine Triphosphate and is the energetic currency of the human body. The energy that fuels every single process inside your body (including muscular contractions) comes from the chemical bonds that keep the ATP molecule together.

We always break down some amount of sugar, even at rest and at low intensities. So why do we have to think about fat oxidation? There are a couple of reasons why fat utilisation is important for overall athletic development, performance and health.

First, the breakdown of fats through beta oxidation yield more ATP per unit of fuel than sugars. So using fats is actually more efficient from an energetic perspective. The second reason is because of the size of our fuel reserves.