Have you heard about the ‘afterburner effect’? Do you know what it is and how to use it? Are you required to purchase anything? The answer is no. The afterburner effect is something your body creates after a period of specific exercise. Have I awakened your interest? Then read on, because activating your fat afterburner is a simple, easy process.
You may have heard exercise buffs talk about the Harris-Benedict formula or the Harris-Benedict equation. Well it’s not rocket science and it has been around for a very long time.
We all know that in order to lose weight/fat, you either have to eat less, or, you can increase how many calories your body burns. I don’t know about you, but I like eating so I would much rather increase how much my body burns. As it turns out, it is really quite easy to get your body to turn on its metabolic afterburners and burn more calories.
Before we go any further, those activity calculators that say if you jog for 30 minutes you will burn just 325 calories, burn them. They are distorted and negative. Here is information you need. According to research, back in 1918, these two dudes called Harris and Benedict discovered that doing cardio caused the body to burn up way more calories than these charts predicted. What they found was that doing cardio puts the body’s metabolism into overdrive so that it continues to burn more calories for around 24 hours after the exercise stops. Harris and Benedict then sat down and came up with some formulas which predict just how many calories afterburners will torch.
The deal is this, if you do 20 minutes to half an hour of cardio a day, the calories you burn are negligible. But if you take that up to 35 minutes a day, the afterburners begin to kick in. Fifty minutes to an hour of cardio is where you hit the jackpot. Twenty-four hours after you would have completed your exercise, your fat afterburners are still working. So that when you step into the gym the next day, you are down close to 600 extra calories which you would have lost while your body was in relax mode.
What’s happening here? Well it’s not magic, nor is it complicated, mysterious, or fancy. It is simply that doing 50-odd minutes of cardio raises your metabolic rate. Just as leading a sedentary life lowers your metabolic rate, high activity sends it skyrocketing.
The question now is what qualifies as cardio. What exercises should you be doing? If you are a beginner, traditional steady state cardiovascular exercise like walking, jogging, swimming and biking would be good. If you are at a certain level of fitness, you can take on some interval training. I would not recommend Tababta workouts.
The Tabata supporters would have you think that four minutes of Tabata is all you need to do, personally, I feel that is some very wishful thinking. At best I would say that 20 minutes of intervals is like 35min of running. One thing that is clear, you must do the cardio daily for the afterburner effect. The afterburner effect only seems to last about 24 hours so you need to do cardio daily if you want the effect. Doing a seven-hour run on Sunday burns off fewer calories than doing a 30-minute jog each day and the seven-hour run is quite impossible.
Now you see why doing cardio is very important to losing fat and getting 6-pack abs. It’s not so much the calories burned during the cardio that is important but the fact that the cardio puts your metabolism into overdrive to burn up fat.
People always ask if they can lose fat and get 6-pack abs without doing cardio, and the answer is – Yes, but its really really hard. Why struggle? Use your fat afterburners.
Males and females with any fitness goals who need personal training or meal plans I can help! Serious inquiries only. Email now to emmersoncampbell@gmail.com or call 661-5954.
