Energy balance consists of three states.  You are either in energy surplus – eating more energy than your body is burning through movement. In an energy deficit – eating less energy than your body is burning through movement. Or, in energy balance – consuming the same amount of energy as your body is burning through movement. These three caloric positions will ultimately determine whether or not you gain, lose or maintain body weight.

Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption often gets listed as the reason to do certain forms of training as it’s started to promote fat loss. 

When training at higher intensities, anaerobic and glycolytic forms of training create an oxygen debt. EPOC is the amount of oxygen required to restore your body to its normal, resting level of metabolic function, this period can last up to 24 hours post-training where you utilise more energy as you recover. This is often called the “after-burn”.

Exercise types that are championed for creating the most EPOC are HIIT, hill sprints, tabata and strength training.

As much as EPOC is a real-life thing. The effect sizes are trivial, with an increase of around 6% resting metabolism.  This will not make a significant difference to body weight or body composition in a situation where someone is not in a caloric energy deficit.

Activity does have an impact on fat loss, but it’s not the main driver. Without nutritional intervention exercise alone will not be effective. The goal of exercise should never be for fat loss but more on what the training type offers. Do you want to build muscle and get strong? – if so then lift weights. Do you want to be anaerobically conditioned? – if so do HIIT and or hill-sprints. 

But don’t do these training modalities because of misinformation around what they offer for fat loss. 

Stay tuned next week for another instalment of Master the Basics and don’t forget to follow me on Instagram where I share exercise techniques, and show you how to maximise your training. I hope you enjoyed this blog post, if you have any questions I host a weekly Sunday Q&A session on my Instagram channel. Otherwise, please feel free to email me at andy@andyvincentpt.com. 

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