Fuzzy Math and the Afterburn Effect
A hard workout can help you burn calories for hours after.
I HIT ALWYN COSGROVE’S blog every month or so. He’s a fitness expert, and his blog seems geared more toward professional trainers than everyday guys. Still, if you ignore the industry-related posts, some real gems come up. Take, for instance, his post on resistance training and how it might burn more calories than experts originally thought. I’ve been thinking this for years.
Of course, I lack the scientific skills to calculate calorie burn, but my experience goes like this: I jump on an electronic piece of equipment, say a stair machine, treadmill, rowing machine, or exercise bike, and plug in my weight. I start doing exercise and the little digital readout tells me how many calories I’m burning. Cool.
The net result? I’m always surprised at how many calories I burn on a machine — seems too easy.
Then, take for instance, the 500-600 or so calories the experts say you burn playing an hour of basketball.
For me, and half the guys I play ball with, these basketball numbers are freakin’ ridiculous. If I take the amount of effort I expend on the court and compare that to the amount of effort I expend on an exercise machine, the basketball playing expends far more calories. By a long shot. Easy to say so.
Obviously “shooting around” expends less calories, and some guys don’t hustle all that much, so sure, they’re going to burn less. And yet, comparing to the machines, playing ball, which works my entire body, is far more of a workout than exercise machines.
Which Leads to the Fuzzy Math
Cosgrove writes, “We’ve found . . . that weight training burns more calories than we originally thought. Why were we wrong? Because we were using a measurement of aerobic work to determine how many calories were burned. However, anaerobic work is a different animal.”
Right on.
When I lift, I tend to do circuit-type training on muscle groups with little rest in between. Not only am I pushing my muscles in a hard focused way, I’m generating a faster heartbeat and can end up breathing hard. I can get damn tired in 15-20 minutes or so of hard work. Busy schedule is why.
In any event, my sense is that my “official” caloric burn would be far less than what it really is — than what I believe it to be. And after a really hard workout, I’m busy replenishing nutrients in my body. If don’t get enough fluids and some good foods, I’m a hurting unit. Sore. Likely to cramp.
The point?
Apparently, some forward-thinking fitness experts like Cosgrove are now saying that after a hard workout beyond what your body can do to keep up, you spend the next 12, 24, or 36 hours metabolically “catching up”, which means you’re burning calories because your body is working harder than normal to get back on track. Cosgrove says the notion is generally described as the “afterburn” effect.
See also: EPOC
It’s clearly difficult to calculate caloric burn from person-to-person from workout-to-workout, but some of the more traditional math that Cosgrove points out could mean that, with new knowledge, “a 30 minute, 300-calorie workout with a 100 calorie ‘afterburn’ (calculated the old way) may be more likely to be a 525 calorie workout and 150 cals from afterburn when calculated the new way — or 675 calories total.”
At Cosgrove’s Results Fitness, they’ve got some special resistance training programs designed to burn calories, and he speculates that the new ways of measuring afterburn might result in more calories being burned than previously thought: “Could that 300 calories that we thought were being burned, actually be closer to 800 or 900?” he asks.
Counting Calories
This is a long way round to say that I’m not counting calories. Of the experts I’ve spoken to and of the articles and books I’ve read on getting six-pack abs and reducing body fat, most of them spend an inordinate amount of time trying to get guys to count their calories and calculate the calories they burn. If you keep close track of that, you can make sure that you’re constantly a little calorie-deficient, which will lead to the fat burn.
Nice.
But what a pain in the ass.
I’ve never going to add up all my calories and figure out what my portions are. What I will do is increase my workout frequency, switch up my workouts, and try to work harder. At the same time, I’ll try to cut out all the really bad and unnecessary foods. And when I eat, I eat for a purpose, asking myself, “What is it that my body needs right now?”
And when I eat, I eat for a purpose, asking myself, “What is it that my body needs right now?”
More protein? Carbs? Veggies? Fruit? Dairy? Fats? What am I missing?
In this way, which quickly becomes second nature, my biggest worry is making sure I have all the major food groups on-hand. (Much harder than keeping a bag Doritos in the cupboard.)
Right. I’m a man, not a professional actor training for a movie role where shirts are in short supply. I’m also not a professional or amateur body builder who can devote hours a day to working out and eating right. Like most guys, I’ve got a day job and the paycheck has little to do with my waist.
But what I can do is make sure that when I can carve out time to exercise, that I hit it hard and make sure that my body will need some time to recover, hopefully extending the overall caloric burn.