Monday, November 4, 2013

What is the ‘After-burn effect?’



If your objective is to gain muscle and lose fat fast then you more than likely know very well about the new research that has come out about the After-burn effect or EPOC. It has been extensively studied by all the Sports Science majors at most universities but someone that took it all a step farther was Dr. Christopher Scott, PHD, who is a professor of exercise physiology at the University of Southern Maine.
The after-burn effect has been well studied and is referred to in the Sports Sciences as EPOC (Excess post-exercise oxygen consumption). Dr Scott has spent years doing specific research on the difference between anaerobic activity and aerobic activity which is any type of cardio training that you do.
Without going into the rather complex differences between the two and also the three additional types of anaerobic exercise that have been studied that one can do and how it is measured. He said that we need to concentrate on the exercise and what it means.
According to Dr. Scott there is a big difference between the energy expenditure when doing cardio compared to weight training. He explains that if one is looking specifically at the amount of calories that are used when you doing weight training compared to cardio there is a big difference because of the EPOC or the after-burn effect.
For example after doing any high intensity weight training program your metabolism is elevated for up to 72 hours and averaging around 48 hours. The point is that when you do weight training for 45min with a high intensity you will burn less calories during the workout. But you will burn more than double the amount of calories over the next 48 hours than you would if you just did cardio only for 45 minutes.
This is important because if your objective is to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time then you just need to do high intensity weight training three times a week and you will get results. It takes a lot of energy to repair the microscopic tears that you have done in your muscles.
The increase demand for energy that you achieve when protein synthesis starts is also demanding and an enormous amount of energy compared to just cycling on a stationary bike for an hour. This applies when you are doing a training split routine or training your whole body using compound movements.
This conclusively proves once again that HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) is the most efficient way to train if you want to build muscle and lose fat fast. Dr. Scott says that science has changed from thinking that long bouts of cardio will burn fat to training with intermittent bursts of high intensity weight training that will burn a lot more fat a lot quicker.
He explains that there is a big difference between burning calories and burning fat and that if you want to burn fat you don’t have to do cardio for 45 minutes you can burn fat as fast as within seconds of doing HIIT training. It is his personal objective to conclusively prove it.

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