When you spend time at the gym, you'd like to know that you're still burning calories after your workout. When you exercise, your body gets the energy it needs for sustained activity by burning stored energy.
When you do aerobic exercise, your body continues to burn calories for a short period of time, up to a few hours after finishing your workout. When you perform strength training exercises, such as weight lifting, you permanently increase your ability to burn calories by increasing your body's supply of muscle tissue.
Although your body continues to burn extra calories for a few hours after a workout, building more muscle will increase the amount your body burns throughout the day.
What exercises continue to burn calories post-workout?
Aerobic exercises, such as swimming and cycling, trigger post-workout burnout by causing you to move your limbs repeatedly for relatively long periods of time. Low intensity activities like walking burn a fairly small amount of extra calories, while high intensity activity like running can burn more than 1,400 in a single hour.
After finishing an aerobic exercise, your body gradually returns to its normal level of calorie use. For experienced athletes doing high-intensity activities, increased calorie burn can continue for up to several hours after a workout ends.
Effects of strength training
During a typical weight lifting workout, you only burn about 180 to 266 calories in an hour , according to Harvard Health Publishing. However, weight lifting, calisthenics, and other strength training exercises also gradually increase the size of your muscles.
Every pound of muscle tissue helps your body burn more calories at rest, and this burning process is not limited to the hours after a workout. As you increase the size of your muscles, your body uses up even more calorie stores every day to meet its ongoing energy needs.
Combination exercise routines
To burn calories and control your weight, experts recommend doing aerobic and strength exercises . Aerobic activity, including any activity performed at a moderate to vigorous level, should be done for a minimum of 150 minutes per week.
They also note that the health benefits of exercise are even greater if you do more than 300 minutes per week . If you're new to exercise or haven't done it for a long time, talk to your doctor and a sports professional before starting a new exercise routine. Generally, you will start with smaller amounts of exercise and gradually increase your efforts.
Tips for beginners
If you are a new athlete, you usually won't be able to exercise at an intensity that promotes prolonged calorie burning after an aerobic workout. When starting a strength training program, you will generally begin to increase the size and strength of your muscles in a matter of several weeks.
You can get some benefits from aerobic activities even if you can only exercise for 10 minutes at a time, while you can get the benefit of strength training exercises in training sessions that last only 20 or 30 minutes.
