The calorie tables can become depressing reading. If you spend half an hour on the stair simulator machine you only consume 300 or 400 calories. One hour 700 or 800.

It seems unfair that such hard and monotonous work doesn’t even allow you to binge on a restaurant once in a while.

Or at least that seems at first glance if you read food labels.

However, calorie charts don’t tell you the whole fat story.

Several new studies show that exercise powers our body furnace and increase the rate at which the body consumes calories throughout the day.

 

And not only is that but if we follow some very simple principles, we can turn the body into a machine with high-calorie consumption.

Your metabolism includes all kinds of chemical processes that take place inside you, such as the digestion of food, the formation of fat, the breakdown of blood sugar into energy, the building of bigger muscles through training.

All of this requires energy, something we express in units called calories. The more chemical processes that take place in the body, the more calories we consume.

Calories are also consumed during exercise. Nutrients provide energy so you can run, swim, lift weights, etc. The harder the exercise, the more calories you can burn.

However, exercise also burns more calories during the recovery period.

Scientists have shown for 100 years that metabolic rate increases after exercising, so the body continues to burn calories faster than normal once we are done with the exercise.

However, until relatively a few years ago, the extent of this metabolism after exercise was not fully understood.

Scientists estimate calories consumed during exercise by measuring the body’s use of oxygen during a certain activity.

And they measure the use of oxygen in liters per minute. Each liter of oxygen used by the body is equivalent to burning five calories.

When exercise is performed at extreme intensities, we reach a ceiling in oxygen consumption called maximum oxygen consumption.

Training at the top, most people use 3 to 4 liters of oxygen per minute and 15 to 20 calories (over a bodyweight of about 68 kilos).

However, since we cannot train as intensively for a long time, the amount of calories consumed during exercise is less than that.

The normal person trains two-thirds of their maximum intensity.

For example, an individual who consumes three liters of oxygen during peak exercise (15 calories per minute for the above weight) will use two liters of oxygen per minute (10 calories per minute) when doing a quick walk, using the stair simulator. or participate in an aerobic class.

Consuming a significant number of calories during exercise involves a lot of work. At the usual intensity in people, it seems that only 600 to 800 calories are used per hour of exercise. And to burn 7,700, which is a kilo of fat, it means spending 10 hours of training intensely.

Fortunately, calorie intake from exercise doesn’t end when you leave the gym.

Our body continues to consume calories faster than normal after completing a training session.

If the exercise is intense and prolonged, under certain conditions the number of extra calories burned during recovery is equivalent to 50 percent of the calories consumed during the exercise itself.

That means that for 400 calories during a half-hour aerobic session, we consume a total of 600, including those expended during recovery.

Until recently, scientists thought that the period after exercise was not important to consume calories and help control body fat.

They estimated that, at most, physical activity increased post-exercise calorie consumption by 15 percent.

Studies in Norway have shown that the extra caloric intake is much higher than previously believed.

In these studies, oxygen consumption during exercise recovery was measured.

He studied the effects of exercise on intensity, duration, and influence on meals. And his discoveries are of paramount importance to anyone trying to control their fat.

First, he found that by training for 30 minutes, there was an elevation of basal metabolism in the post-exercise phase involving the extra consumption of 150 calories over 12 hours.

The extra 150 calories (30 liters of extra oxygen) accounted for 50 percent of the calories expended in exercise.

That involved a kind of gifted benefit equivalent to a 15-minute quick walk or stair simulator without having to do the job.

It was also found that the body increases its use of fat after exercising by 300 percent.

When you haven’t eaten for three hours and you’re resting, your body often uses some of the fat for energy.

After exercising, the body burns fatter during the recovery period than it would have if you had not trained.

The breakdown of fat after exercise is greater if we have trained intensively.

The harder we work exercising the greater the fat utilization will be after we have finished.

When the intensity is high (like weight training), more carbohydrates are used.

However, during the recovery phase, the fuel use patterns are different – intense exercise conditions us to use more fat as fuel after training.

Intense training provides an additional benefit to fat consumption during recovery: it initiates energy-wasting pathways within our metabolic systems.

Scientists call these caloric expenditure routes “futile cycle. “

Here, metabolic reactions emit energy in the form of heat instead of converting it to fat or other useful forms of potential energy.

Fight or flight hormones like adrenaline promote the “futile cycle” in cells. And the adrenaline increases with exercise.

Therefore, we may start the futile cycle and consume more calories after exercise when we have trained intensively during our weight routine.