New research suggests that intensity is best for torching calories during your workout -- and for more than 14 hours post-exercise.
Like most of us, you probably work out to help you lose weight and firm up. Unfortunately, our wimpy exercise these days just isn’t cutting it, says David C. Neiman, DrPh, who is the director of Appalachian State University’s Human Performance Lab, and one of the study’s authors. “We need to be pushed again to get lean with exercise. A 45-minute vigorous workout can help you get three times the net calories burned compared to the same 45 minutes spent walking.”
The study, published in the September 2011 issue of Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, used a metabolic chamber (considered the most accurate way of measuring energy expenditure) and included 10 male subjects. On the test day, subjects exercised vigorously in the morning for 45 minutes and then measured their metabolic rates for the next 24 hours. The subjects also completed a 24-hour period in the metabolic chamber with no exercise, so that the researchers could compare the differences in energy expenditure between the day in which subjects exercised versus when they were sedentary.
