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How to Trigger "Afterburn" and Melt Calories While You Sit on the Couch

Have you heard of "Afterburn?" It's an increased period of increased energy expenditure that happens after your workout is over. Burning fat is all about bumping up total energy expenditure and afterburn is an amazing energy expenditure boosting side-effect of exercise. But here's the deal: Some types of exercise are better at triggering afterburn than others.

Susan Ohtake

Certified Personal Trainer

Afterburn = EPOC

The scientific term for afterburn is actually EPOC.

Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption—EPOC for short.

What is EPOC/Afterburn anyway?

It might sound complicated, but when you break it down, EPOC is really easy to understand.

It's All About Oxygen

When you work out, your muscles use oxygen. The harder you work out, the more oxygen your muscles use. This is called “aerobic” exercise, a term you’re probably already familiar with.

When we workout very intensely, our muscles need oxygen faster than we can breathe it in. That’s why two things happen:

You get out of breath
Your muscles start to burn from lack of oxygen

You incur what experts call an “oxygen debt.” Your body has to replace the oxygen in your muscles it used, so it works over the next minutes or hours to pay it back.

That means that, even when you finish working out, your body is still using energy to get your oxygen levels back to normal.

Exercising So It Takes Longer to Return to Normal

Some types of exercise take your body longer to recover from. During this recovery period, calorie burning (that's energy expenditure) is higher.

What type of exercise is best?

If you want to trigger maximum afterburn, short, high-intensity intervals are your best bet.

That's because the more intensity you get in a workout, the more oxygen you use in your muscles. Therefore, it takes longer for them to fill back up with oxygen.

Let's Get Intense!

Burning calories during a workout used to be all that really mattered. However, as we learn more and more about how the body works, we are learning about how wrong we were.

Since MOST of the fat you burn is burned off after your workout, what happens after is crucial to your weight loss. By discovering that the intensity of your workout affects the way your body responds afterward, we know more about how to exercise effectively.

This is one of the reasons why I prefer to focus on shorter, more intense workouts.

When you add up the total calories burned, shorter, intense workouts can melt away just as many calories as longer efforts. It's all thanks to the increased calorie burn caused by EPOC (aka afterburn).