[ELI5] How Does The Body Still Burn Calories Up to 24 Hours After a HIIT Workout
In: 5
Maybe but the EPOC from HIT is soo small it’s not worth thinking about or taking into consideration.
I don’t see why it should? Can you elaborate?
The simplest I can say is:
Going from exercise to rest isn’t like flipping a switch. It’s more like shutting down a factory, it takes a lot of steps that happen subconsciously and all those steps “drain power”.
Processes removing lactic acid, restoring oxygen levels to normal and healing muscle damage all take caloric energy to do.
I think the afterburn is something along the lines of 5-10% of your total burn. And it’s not limited to HIIT workouts either, you theoretically get this effect from any type of workout, just different degrees of calory burn depending on the type of exercise.
Hope this helped.
The body burns calories 24/7 from conception to death. Not just while exercising.
After intense exercise, some extra calories are burned by EPOC (excess post-exercise O2 consumption) as someone mentions below, but also a lot of energy (calories) is used to repair tissues like muscle and bone that are slightly damaged, cool the body back to normal, move fluids (blood, lymph) and molecules (ATP, Ca2+, etc) back to their resting positions.
EPOC or oxygen deficit is the extra oxygen you consume after intense exercise to clear the lactic acid that builds up. This happens because you can burn carbs, which results in accumulating lactic acid, faster than your body can clear the lactic acid. Oxygen is used to clear it afterwards.
Increasingly I read information that the body doesn’t actually burn more calories from exercise at all. Even if exercise does burn a few more calories in the moment this is averaged out over time and compensated for.
Apparently the science says we all burn the same amount of calories on average whether we exercise a lot or not.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24132130-400-why-doing-more-exercise-wont-help-you-burn-more-calories/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-exercise-paradox/
Exercise is still very good for you, just wanted to add that, but apparently won’t help you lose weight.
Latest Answers