Burn Calories with Excess Post Exercise Oxygen Consumption

Burn Calories with Excess Post Exercise Oxygen Consumption

How would you like to be able to burn calories for potentially up to 36 or 48 hours after exercise? I am talking about burning calories and helping you lose weight even while you are sitting around the house watching television. Is it possible? Apparently so. It is called Excess Post Exercise Oxygen Consumption or EPOC for short.

If you hearken back to the days of your high school biology class you will remember a term called homeostasis. It is merely a fancy term for the desire for your body to be in a state of balance. Keep that in mind as we talk about EPOC.

When you perform intense cardiovascular exercise or weight training your body burns oxygen at a much higher rate than it did before the exercise began. Even when the exercise is complete your body continues to need a higher level of oxygen. This is known as excess post exercise oxygen consumption.

After this intense exercise the body sets about trying to restore itself to its pre-exercise state, therefore, it consumes oxygen at a higher rate. Your body has been depleted of a number of different sources of energy and must replenish them. You have depleted creatine phosphate (yes, this is the same stuff that is sold in supplement stores), ATP (adenosine triphosphate) and glycogen. Also during this time of exercise you have oxygen depleted your body.

Now you may be thinking that as soon as you catch your breath that you have recovered oxygen. But remember that your blood is oxygenated and during exercise you used up a good part of that to break down food substrates so that it could be used for energy during your workout. So even after exercise is complete your body continues to expend energy to replenish the oxygen in your blood stream.

The good news for you is that EPOC helps play a role in enabling you to burn calories and lose weight more effectively. If you perform high intensity exercise then you will continue to burn calories even after exercise is done. If you have wondered by people have said that interval training is much more effective that steady state aerobics, this is the exact reason. High intensity, interval training has a bigger effect on excess post exercise oxygen consumption. Not only that but studies have also shown that high intensity weight training has a bigger impact on EPOC than does aerobic exercise. This is why intense weight training or intense body weight exercise can lead to greater weight loss than going out and running a mile everyday.

So if you want to burn calories and lose weight at a higher level that you need to up the intensity of your workouts. Intense workouts can continue to pay small dividends over the next number of hours, sometimes even a day or two later.

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