Burning calories long after the workout ends...

Monday, October 10, 2011

The headline read “Vigorous exercise burns calories for 14 hours after exercise”. Okay…I’d never use the same noun twice in a title…but let’s forget that for a second see what the story’s all about. Mimi had given me the article from USA Today and when I went on American College of Sports Medicine’s site, I found the original research article. The original research was conducted using 10 healthy male participants living and exercising in a metabolic chamber for two 24-hour periods and comparing their caloric burns in the two situations. In one, they simply did their every day tasks…eating, sleeping and moving around inside the chamber…which is nothing more than an enclosed room designed to measure caloric expenditure. On the second day, they followed the same routine, except they also did a vigorous 45-minute bike ride on a stationary bike. On the second day, they burned an additional 190 calories AFTER they stopped exercising and over the next 14 hours.

The good news is that you can burn more calories than just what you’ve burned while working out when exercising vigorously (defined as at least 70% of your age predicted maximum). What surprises me though is that this research was treated as a new revelation. I can remember learning this same information when working on my graduate degree…which was about 30 years ago. And as so many who exercise and check their pulses regularly know, your resting heart rate does not return to its pre-exercise level for a long time after finishing. I was surprised to learn that the metabolism did stay higher into the 14th hour following the exercise and maybe that’s the new revelation. In any event…just one more reason to exercise vigorously as often as you can.

Which I didn’t. Holly and I went to the park together and just did a casual 50-minute walk. My back was still smarting and I wasn’t anxious to push it in this condition. It’s a good chance to catch up and still get something done, but there was surely no 14-hour calorie burning benefit to this excursion.

Walk duration: 50 minutes
Training Heart Rate: 75 bpm.
Calories burned during workout: 250.