The Best Way To Burn Fat: EPOC

Excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC, informally called afterburn) is a measurably increased rate of oxygen intake following strenuous activity intended to erase the body's "oxygen deficit". In fact, the term "oxygen debt" is still widely used to this day. In recovery, oxygen (EPOC) is used in the processes that restore the body to a resting state and adapt it to the exercise just performed. Another use of EPOC is to fuel the body's increased metabolism from the increase in body temperature which occurs during exercise. EPOC is accompanied by an elevated consumption of fuel. THAT FUEL IS FAT!

The EPOC effect is greatest soon after the exercise is completed and decays to a lower level over time. Anaerobic exercise in the form of high-intensity interval training was also found in one study to result in greater loss of subcutaneous fat, even though the subjects expended fewer than half as many calories during exercise! In a 1992 Purdue study, results showed that high intensity, anaerobic type exercise resulted in a significantly greater magnitude of EPOC than aerobic exercise of equal work output.

OK, Clint! Enough of the exercise lingo! What does that mean to me?!?! It means, if your workouts are short and intense, you will continue to burn fat via EPOC for up to 38 hours after you finish. If you do LSD (steady state exercise on a treadmill, outside, elliptical, etc.) EPOC ends very shortly after you're done!

OK, fitness boy?! How the heck do I do that?! The easiest way to attain and maintain intensity is interval (fast/rest) training. Interval is the best of cardio and Tabata (20 seconds hard exercise/10 seconds rest) is the King intervals!!!!

By the way, there is a way to get the EPOC effect in your resistance training (lifting), too. Weight lifting using compound lifts, which means multijoint weightlifting exercises performing a weightlifting circuit that alternates between upper- and lower-body exercises will place a greater demand on the involved muscles for Adenosine triphosphate, or ATP for short. ATP is a high-energy molecule found in every cell. Its job is to store and supply the cell with needed energy. Increased demand for anaerobic ATP also causes a greater demand on the aerobic system to resupply the muscles with ATP during the rest periods and during exercise recovery.

So what does all this mean? It means that intensity is more important than duration. Exercise sessions need to be short, fast and hard. Cardio needs to be high intensity intervals, whether it is body-weight circuits, sprints, or some type of machine like elliptical or treadmill. Lifting must favor compound exercises such as squats, deadlifts, bench press, over isolation exercises like curls or leg extensions. The cardio sessions alone will give you the EPOC effect for up to 36 hours after exercise is over!

If you want exercise advice feel free to email me at cdrgrimes@gmail.com or message me on Facebook. You can also see my exercise videos there. To get the secret of achieving and maintaining a healthy weight go to http://tinyurl.com/healthy60

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/expert/Clint_Grimes/753096

For Weight Loss: If You Could Only Pick One

Nothing about weight loss has changed since the beginning of time! The road to a healthy weight has always been the Second Law of Thermodynamics;

Calories in - Calories out = Calories accumulated.

To put it simply, to lose weight you need to eat less, exercise more or both. What if you could only use one method. There are many eating/diet plans, and good ones, Nutrisystem, Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers, just to name a few. On the exercise side some of the most famous, or infamous exercise programs include P90X and Insanity. All of these programs are effective in their own right, but if you had to choose one direction, which way should you go?

The answer is perfectly clear. If you could choose exercise or diet, you should choose diet. I say this with the utmost confidence. And this is coming from the mouth of a lifetime fitness fanatic and a strength and conditioning coach. Why do I say this with so much confidence? That's easy! It is extremely difficult to out exercise your diet! Let me give you a couple vivid examples.

If you had an 140 lb woman, and she ate two pieces of cheese pizza and a piece of cheese cake, that would be a total of 955 calories. In order to burn that off, she would have to run 10 minute miles for 1.5 hours! In the height of my running days as a young man I couldn't do that and I highly doubt you could either.

Here's another vivid example of this. According to Malia Frey, a weight loss expert writing on About Health, dropping a daily large cola from McDonald's completely (if you drink about one per day) would result in reducing your annual calorie intake by over 200,000 calories - or about 60 pounds - in one year. Replace that soda with water and overcome obesity. That's just one large soda. For the same 140 lb woman to burn the same amount of calories, she would have to run 1.5 miles in 16 minutes, EVERY DAY! Wouldn't be easier just not to drink the soda and have a glass of water instead?

Fortunately, we don't have to pick one. We can incorporate both a healthy meal plan and exercise in achieving and maintaining a healthy weight. Experts say that the contribution is 75% nutrition and 25% exercise. I will talk about both in future articles.

If you want exercise advice feel free to email me at cdrgrimes@gmail.com or message me on Facebook. To get the secret of achieving and maintaining a healthy weight go to http://tinyurl.com/healthy60

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/expert/Clint_Grimes/753096