New Study - how to keep burning calories after exercise

Nice Hat

A very carefully designed study was just completed that shows how to continue burning calories after an exercise session.  It's not about what you do after, but what you do DURING your exercise session that counts.  Intensity is the key.

This is relatively new evidence and I am unsure how far you can extrapolate it.  The studies parameters were cycling (pretty hard) for 45 minutes.  This caused an initial 420 calories to be burned (during the cycling) and 37% more to be burned over the next 24 hours (without any other activity).  The secret of the "intensity" factor is that the participants were unable to carry on a conversation.  This is about 70% of VO2Max (for the technical folks)

Thought I find this interesting and noteworthy, I prefer to examine the other facts of weight loss and metabolism that show that 65%+ of all calories burned in a day are "resting" metabolism.  In order to increase your resting metabolism you need to be building lean muscle.  Lean muscle is built through resistance exercise, weights, bodyweight movements and also high-intensity intervals.  If you increase your lean muscle tissue you can have big effects on that 65%.  You'll burn more calories sleeping at night than you ever could during a workout.  But you'll have the benefits of burning calories while you worked out too!

Brian, TheDailyFit