Benefits of exercise keep on keeping off

Calories keep burning after a long, intense workout, reports Nanci Hellmich, of USA Today.

People who exercise vigorously get a bonus for their hard work: They continue to burn extra calories long after they have finished working out, a new study shows.

Researchers found that men who biked intensely on a stationary bike for 45 minutes burned an extra 190 calories over the 14 hours after their workout. This is in addition to the calories they used while exercising.

"This is the best evidence we have that a lot of calories are burned after intense exercise," says the study's lead author, David Nieman, an exercise researcher with Appalachian State University in Kannapolis, North Carolina.

The findings may also apply to other high-intensity, sweat-producing activities such as running, jogging and playing intense games of sport, he says.

To get the extra calorie-burning benefits, the workout needs to be intense enough that "you're sweating, your body temperature is up and your heart beats fast," Nieman says.

Other researchers have looked at moderate-intensity activities, such as walking, and found no post-activity impact on calories, he says. You might be able to turn walking into this kind of calorie-burning workout but it would probably mean hiking uphill with a backpack, stair-climbing or race-walking, he says.

Nieman and his colleagues at Appalachian State and researchers at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill studied the caloric expenditures of 10 men, ages 22 to 33, using a scientific device called a metabolic chamber. It's a silicone-sealed room that looks like a small hotel room with a bed, laptop, toilet and sink.

Researchers are able to measure the participant's oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide production in the room and determine the calorie expenditure of that person.

For the study, each participant had a rest day in the room, doing very little activity for 24 hours except for sitting and sleeping.

Each participant spent a second day in the room, following a similar routine except he cycled vigorously for 45 minutes beginning at 11am.

The findings were reported in this month's Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, the journal of the American College of Sports Medicine:

• The men burned an average of 190 more calories during the 14.2 hours after exercising, compared to their rest day in the chamber.

• They burned an average of 519 calories during the biking. Hence, they used about 709 more calories on workout days than on rest days.

"That means a person would lose one pound [454g] after five intense exercise bouts if they resisted the temptation to eat more," Nieman says.

"This shows that intense exercise can have a meaningful impact on your body fat stores if you don't counter it with an extra piece of cake.

"I hope this will motivate people to get out there to do sweat-producing activities. You get so much bang for your buck."

Although the study involved men, Nieman says "there's every reason to believe that the findings apply to women, too".

 

Add a Comment