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.






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8 comments:

Anonymous said...

well i never knoew what epoc was. thanks

Usman Pasha Siddiqui said...

Well now you do and you can spread the word :)

Rocky said...

I didn't knew anything about this EPOC, but now I do. Thanks dude great post.

Anonymous said...

I have been using Phentermine to burn my fat and it works really well, I ordered it from www.medsheaven.com you can easy loose lots of pounds with this without even working out, and if you do workout you will loose a lot more! this is the best fat loss medicine ever I highly recommend it.

Nazeem Dollie said...

awesome post mate! i'm a fitness professional from cape town, south africa, and due to release my fitness e-book globally via click bank. i just wanted another fitness professional to confirm what i've always known about EPOC. thanks mate. wa alaykum salaam,

nazeem

sensor headset said...

Wow! This is awesome. Excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC) is a physiological measure of the oxygen consumed in excess of resting requirements after exercise. Basically, it provides a measure as to the demand of a training session. That is why EPOC can provide a great measure of your training load in intensity based sessions, but isn't a great method of assessing load on long slow runs. Thank you for sharing this wonderful information.

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fsl said...

What you think about Shaun T's approach (talking about insanity workout). Instead of doing sprints and then doing recovery. He believes in keeping heart rate up and taking short breaks in between. I experience more intense EPOC effect (body trying to breath deeply without me knowing it) after that.