Hey troopers

I hope you all had a great weekend and are having a super start to your week. Today, I wanted to share with you a concept you may or may not have heard about called ‘afterburn’ and if you haven’t you really should ! So please read on …

Basically ‘afterburn’ is the idea of burning calories and fat even after your workout is done and dusted. Sounds great doesn’t it ?! Sometimes it is referred to as EPOC (excess post exercise oxygen consumption).

In all honesty afterburn is achieved from all types of exercise. But certain exercises/styles of training achieve a great afterburn. Remember not all exercises are created equal.

All about afterburn

Afterburn occurs when you exercise and take yourself beyond what your capable of doing. Your body then uses the next 12, 24, 36 hours to ‘recover’ metabolically and that means its burning calories. Whoot whoot !!! Still with me ? I hope so, as this is a bit more of a technical blog but it’s important you get the gist of what I am saying. It’s important, so stick with me.

You see your body adapts to exercise stress via afterburn/EPOC, which causes the body to burn an elevated amount of calories so that it can get back to its ‘normal’ bodily state. The bigger the stress i.e. the between high intensity/low intensity exercise, the more difficult it is for the body to adapt to the stress you have applied to it. Long bouts of steady state exercise at a constant pace doesn’t cause a massive stress to the point where EPOC will be elevated over a long period of time. Don’t get me wrong it does elevate EPOC but the body is able to recover alot quicker. Whereas intense interval training/exercise will cause a huge elevation and therefore a longer recovery time.

Now I hear you say ‘so how many calories extra will I burn?’ – Through all my research and scouting over the internet there is no clear answer other than ‘alot’. It is very hard to accurately measure and quantify.

But studies comparing the same volume of caloric work between interval training/resistance training to aerobic steady state training do reveal a huge difference in total fat lost over a period of time. And evidence does show that change does happen post workout as a result of high intensity metabolic work that doesn’t happen to the same degree as with lower intensity work, even if the calories burned during the actual training are equal.

To back up what I am saying let’s look at some recent research data thanks to my friend Alwyn Cosgrove:

Knab et al: A 45-Minute Vigorous Exercise Bout Increases Metabolic Rate for 14 Hours.
Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2011 Feb 8.

These researchers had subjects undergo a bout of cycling at approx 73% of VO2 max (approximately 84% of max heart rate) for 45 mins. The subjects burned on average 520 calories in the 45 min training session. The following day their resting energy expenditure was increased an average of 190 cals compared to norm. Basically – the subjects burned an additional 37% MORE calories than the workout itself in the 14 hour post workout period — meaning that a single high-intensity session, when including the post-workout metabolic boost could burn up to 710 cals in total.

Heden et al: One-set resistance training elevates energy expenditure for 72 h similar to three sets.
European Journal of Applied Physiology. Volume 111, Number 3, 477-484, Mar 2011

The subjects were put on a very simple resistance training routine – full body training, either 1 or 3 sets per exercise of ten exercises. The researchers then examined the subjects resting energy expenditure at 24, 48 and 72 hours post workout. Both groups showed an elevated metabolism (afterburn effect) of around 100 cals per day. But there was no difference between groups. It seems that it’s intensity that determines how many calories are burned post-workout, not volume (obviously a higher volume program would burn more calories during the session than a lower volume program.

So what do I take from all this and more importantly what’s my advice to YOU ? Intensity in your workouts is key whether its weights or cardio. So push yourself hard. It’s well documented and proven that the most effective and efficient way to blowtorch fat is a combination of resistance training and some sort of interval/plyo/circuit routine that really elevates your heart rate. I call combining the two MRT or Metabolic Resistance Training. It would also make sense to choose big compound moves that engage many muscles to increase the intensity.

Any questions you know where I am !

Alex x