The EPOC effect

I have written a number of articles where I mentioned the EPOC effect, but I never wrote an article on what EPOC actually is. I won’t go into A LOT of detail at this point. It really depends on you. If you want to know more, leave a comment asking questions or just tell me that I should write more about EPOC.

EPOC stands for Excess Post-exercise Oxygen Consumption, which means that the usage or need of oxygen increases after an exercise session. The extra oxygen is used to get your body back to its resting state. A number of operations take place in our body such as hormone balancing, replenishment of fuel stores and anabolism. The main thing that we should be concerned with is that it increases our metabolism after a workout. Depending on how strenuous the exercise was the length of the EPOC effect varies. The strenuous the exercise, the longer the EPOC effect. This is where the concept of burning fat during rest and sleep came from. So if you workout really hard, you will burn fat till hours after the workout and even while you sleep.

The common concept is that you just do cardio to lose fat as it increases your metabolism during the workout and an hour or so after. However, latest research shows us that you can increase your fat loss dramatically through strength training. Anaerobic training increases your EPOC effect for hours and hours after the workout, which means that your metabolism increases for a long long time and you burn more fat. The more and larger the muscle groups fatigued, the longer the EPOC effect.
According to research, the absolute best kind of workout for EPOC is HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training). I have already written quite a bit about HIIT so I won’t go into any details to bore you :-).

My recommendation to get the most out of the EPOC effect, is to workout as many muscle groups as you can at one time and completely drain yourself (you don’t need to workout for hours to do this…this can be done short and high intensity workouts. You can find examples in my previous posts) and do HIIT the following day. You will be amazed with the results.

Hope this was useful. Let me know what you think about this post. Let me know if you want to know more. Stay tuned for some very interesting posts, still to come.