Can You Turn Your Body Into a Fat-Burning Furnace?
Bringing Home Community News, May 2012
By Kevin Carrier, North Pinellas Adventure Boot Camp for Women
You absolutely can! However, to take full advantage of this powerful technique you need to shift your focus from what happens DURING exercise to what occurs AFTERWARDS!
We are talking about EPOC. Simply put, it’s an acronym for Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption, which represents the number of additional calories the body will burn after your workout is finished.
If you are one of those people who exercise a lot but don’t lose much (or any) weight, you will definitely benefit from this amazing technique.
Ok, but how does it work?
You just finished a strenuous workout and this bout of exertion made you a bit breathless. As your body is recovering and restoring itself to its pre-exercise state, you are consuming oxygen AND expending energy at an increased rate. In the process, you are burning calories and fat.
With the right kind of exercise, EPOC can boost the metabolism for 24-36 hours after the workout is completed- that is HUGE if you are serious about weight loss.
All this is awesome, right? But before you start your workout, be aware that…
…not all exercise is created equal!
Certain workouts are better than others in eliciting the beneficial “after-burn” responses, while some are, well, pretty useless.
Take jogging, for example. The truth is that it burns almost NO calories after the run is finished.
What about resistance training? If it involves heavy weights and enough repetitions, it could be effective. However, light dumbbells and a few reps are not going to be challenging enough to keep burning fat and calories for hours after your workout is over.
How about “regular” aerobic cardio? Studies show that a 20-minute session produces, on average, 20 minutes of fat burning and then the body returns to its normal state. That’s it.
However, there is one routine that’s vastly superior to all the others. Can you guess what it is?
And the EPOC prize goes to….
Interval training! When it comes to weight loss, those bursts of high-intensity activity followed by periods of recovery (also known as High Intensity Interval Training – HIIT) are super effective.
HIIT is wonderful. It boosts your metabolism and fat oxidation longer than traditional steady-state cardio, resulting in over 30 hours of post-exercise calorie and fat burn. You literally burn fat as you’re sleeping!
(And, there are further advantages to interval training as well: you will notice steady improvement in your cardiovascular fitness, speed, strength, endurance, energy level, and agility).
Now that you know how that “after-burn” can help you achieve better weight loss results and other fitness goals much faster than other workouts, call or email me today to start your EPOC-boosting program!
About the Author, Kevin Carrier
Kevin Carrier is the owner of North Pinellas Adventure Boot Camp for Women, where time flies in this fast and fun, never-a-dull-moment, one-hour boot camp. If you’re ready to experience the “EPOC” after-burn, register for our next boot camp at www.BootCampRocks.com.