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Everybody wants the "easy" way to burn fat, lose their tummy fat or lose weight, and many scammers take advantage of this. But there is one way that you can really burn fat in your sleep and it uses the body's own natural systems to achieve it.
We all look for the easy way out when it comes to losing that beer gut, losing weight or losing fat. All the scams out there want to cheat you of your hard-earned cash for this "promise." But there is a way you can literally burn fat in your sleep!
We are going to go a bit physiologically nerdy here (but don't worry, I will try to make this as simple as I can).
First of all, hard training beats low intensity training. Hard is of course relative; for my clients who are senior citizens, hard may be brisk walking. But for my national level athletes, hard could be repeated 200-metre sprints.
The main thing is that hard training is the best kind. We are already sedentary in most of our jobs and city lifestyles. Does it make sense if we do minimal work during our exercise time as well? That makes no sense.
EPOC is one of the coolest things about hard, intense training. It stands for "Excess-Post-exercise-Oxygen-Consumption."
When we train hard, we use energy faster than we can get it from oxygen in the air. This creates a "debt" in our energy system that will eventually need to be repaid. Sounds fair? Yup, all that energy came from somewhere! That somewhere is our anaerobic (no oxygen needed) sources that are already present in our cells.
So what have we just done? We have used energy beyond what we can sustain. If we were doing low intensity work, we could just breathe and get all the energy we need from our aerobic (oxygen needed) source. But no! We have exceeded that source and have tapped into other sources beyond what we can sustain.
It's payback time. Once the intense activity stops, the body starts to recover from that activity. During this time, many things are happening to get the body back to a "normal" state. All these things use CALORIES! In fact, the above-normal calorie usage can last 30 or more HOURS after the end of the hard training session.
Like I have always said, hard training is like putting money in a growth fund, which makes money while you do nothing! With EPOC, you literally burn calories in your sleep (just like many of the scam products out there claim); the only difference is that this is real!
Here is a short list and description of what your body is doing to get back to a rested, normal state. This is quite a long list of items and you will soon see why and how EPOC has the ability to help you burn lots of calories.
Restore ATP-PC: In simple terms, this means that we need to replenish the anaerobic sources in the body that we tapped into during the intense training
Restore Oxygen Stores: This gets our blood oxygen levels back to normal.
Restore Heart and Breathing Rates to Normal: When a hard, intense exercise session stops, your heart rate, breathing and other functions do not suddenly go back to normal. This, of course, requires energy as well as time, because they are both needed to restore the body back to its regular functioning.
Restore Hormone Levels: There are several hormones (OK fellow nerds - epinephrine, norepinephrine, thyroxine, cortisol) that are increased. To clear the excess hormones out, the body has a chemical "pump" that needs energy to function.
Restore Body Temperature: During exercise, heat production is likely to excede heat removal. That means increased body temperature. For each degree celcius above normal, a 13 to 15 percent rise in calorie usage is needed for recovery.
Remove Lactate: Lactate is a by-product of exercise and it accumulates in muscles. It also takes energy to remove.
That's why all good fat loss programmes make full use of the EPOC property. That means weight training with low rest periods, exercises that use the whole body and interval training as opposed to long, slow endurance type activity, which only burns calories during the exercise session.
Jonathan Wong
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