The Story of Fat Loss: The Afterburn Effect

A couple of months ago I wrote an article I called The Tortoise and The Hare. We all know the story, the hare started off fast and ran out of steam and had a nap under a tree whilst the tortoise paced himself, took his time and won the race. My point at the time was about specificity. The tortoise won the race, but the hare looked better in a bikini.

Now, despite my clever and humorous approach to describing what seems to me to be very simple the point seems to of been missed. With thousands of people heading off to gyms to achieve the obligatory ‘New Year, New You’ resolution I can still see the same mistakes being made.

Unfortunately the majority of people will be doing the same lame gym routine, attending the same lame class or following the same lame diet as last year and expecting something other than the same lame results they’ve always got.

I don’t mean to be critical (actually I do) BUT if it didn’t work for you last time, surely it won’t work for you this time, right?

So....... This leads us back to the tortoise and the hare.

My point a couple of month ago was that if your ambition is to win a long distance running race there may be some merit in taking it slow. However, if your ambition is to look smoking hot on the beach, at a party in a little black dress or simply without any clothes on you needn’t take the same approach.

Please don’t misinterpret what I’m about to say. Slow and steady cardiovascular exercise will not make you fat. It might bore you to death, injure you or make you hungry for carbs, but I agree doing something is better than nothing.

When someone comes to me and wants to get fit (more specifically look good in a bikini) unless they enjoy pounding the street or spending 45 minutes on the cross-trainer I’m not gonna get them doing it.

The majority of my clients are hopelessly short of time and any ‘spare’ time they make for exercise they need to use wisely. This is why having a better understanding of EPOC or The Afterburn Effect is essential.

I make no secret of the fact that eating a clean diet is essential to burn fat. BUT hand-in-hand with nutrition is exercise and a double whammy of both is best.

When exercising for fat loss you need to consider EPOC (exercise post oxygen consumption) - the recovery of metabolic rate back to pre-exercise levels.

Many people are fixated with the calorie expenditure during the event (the exercise) and totally overlook what happens afterwards. The truth is once you have finished exercise it can take several minutes for your metabolism to return to pre-exercise rate with light exercise or several hours for something more intense or more vigorous.

Evidence might dispute exactly how big the contribution of EPOC makes to the whole fat loss equation but observation of professional athletes who participate in similar activities can offer a great insight. For example - a football player who for all sense and purpose repeatedly sprints for 90 minutes has a lean and toned physique, a marathon runner such as Paula Radcliffe runs at the similar speed for two and a half hours and whilst lean does not have a similar sort of muscle tone and instead has a kinda skinny fat body shape. Which one would you prefer to look like?



Another important distinction comes when in isocaloric comparisons (meaning the session burnt the same amount of calories during them) resistance training always results in greater fat loss than aerobic training. Like I said the reasons why this is so and to how big or small this effect can be is up for dispute, but the evidence is clear. If you want more fat loss in shorter amount of time doing exercise with a significant afterburn effect is essential.

So what does this mean to you? Well, if you have a limited time for exercise and want to be fit and toned (like the hare or the football player) you MUST work at a higher intensity.

It’s not so much to do with what you do at the time, its the after effects that matter. If you work at a higher intensity with short durations of more intense efforts with short timely recoveries you will experience accelerated fat loss. You can do this in the gym with free weights or on a treadmill or you could do it outside with body weight training or you could just find a big hill and run up and down it several times.

However you choose to do it, if you want to burn fat fast consider EPOC.