Jeff's Thoughts

• Understanding EPOC

  13 May, 2011

  During a personal training career that is getting to be many years now, EPOC is still one of the fundamentals that people do not understand. EPOC stands for Exercise Post Oxygen Consumption. It basically is talking about the amount of calories burnt after you have finished your exercise. Whether you are running or weight training there is always an EPOC. However if you are going out for a run it has been shown that the EPOC only lasts for about 30 – 45 mins (of course this will be a factor of how long and hard you run for). It makes sense that the more the body has to repair itself post exercise, the more calories needed to recover from that exercise routine. Therefore to truly get results, the EPOC is important as it is not about the time you exercise that counts, but how long the EPOC lasts for afterwards. This is why weight training is a far more superior fat loss activity than long continuous aerobic activity (one of the many reasons). After a weight training session it has been shown that your EPOC lasts for 36 – 48 hours. Therefore over the big picture of a few days, you will burn a lot more calories from weight training. Of course this also depends on so many factors such as tempo, rest periods and mostly intensity of training you use during your weight training. So many mistakes are made by people in the weight room, I believe most of them are really wasting their time, but with a personal trainer who understands the fundamentals of changing someone’s body fat percentage (this is different to building muscle) the results can be far superior than any normal jogging routine.

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