Most exercise programs only look at how many calories you burned during your workout. This is why traditionally we are taught that we have to do long, slow, boring and tedious workouts like jogging or cycling if we want to lose fat. This is however NOT the case!

EPOC – is an acronym in exercise science that stands for ‘Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption.’ This refers to the calories and fat burning that occur after a workout. After a workout, your body must recover and return back to its normal state. Your body repairs broken muscle fibres, re-stocks glycogen levels which have been depleted, removes lactic acid from muscles, and brings down the heart rate and body temperature. All of these processes require calories and the majority of these come from fat calories. The degree of your EPOC is directly related to the INTENSITY of your workout. The harder you can workout, the more disrupt all of the measures listed above are and therefore the more energy (calories) your body will burn to bring them back down to normal again. A great way to get your EPOC levels really high is High Intensity Interval Training. One of our favourite High Intensity Interval Workouts is a very simple but very effective way in which to increase your EPOC levels. Make sure you warm up first.The Tabata Sprint as fast as you can for 20 seconds, recover for 10 seconds Repeat this process for eight rounds. That’s 4 minutes in total. We then want you to rest for 4 minutes. Follow this by a further eight rounds of 20 seconds of sprinting and 10 seconds of recovery. The workout should last 12 minutes.Let’s compare this workout to jogging for one hour

Jogging vs Tabata Intervals

Was the workout fun?

jog= No tabata = yes

How many Calories burned in the session?

jog= 512 in 1 hour tabata = 234 in 12 mins

How many Calories burned in 24 hours?

jog= 588 in 24 hours tabata= 897 in 24 hours

Was it an efficient use of time?

jog= No tabata= Yes

Energy systems worked?

jog= Aerobic tabata= Aerobic and Anaerobic

Did it boost my metabolism?

jog= No tabata= Yes

You will notice that one hour of jogging burned more calories compared to the 12 minutes of High Intensity Intervals, but with jogging your intensity levels are very low so there is minimal disruption on your EPOC levels resulting in only a few more calories burned over the 24 hour period. On the other hand the High Intensity Interval EPOC was massively disrupted resulting in significantly more calories burned over the 24 hours period. A study at Lavel University in Quebec published in the journal called Metabolism in 1994 showed that High Intensity Interval Training burned significantly more calories of body FAT compared to Steady- state Endurance exercise. Researchers calculated and concluded that each calorie burned with High Intensity exercises burns off 9 times MORE FAT, than a calorie burned during steady-state endurance exercise. To Conclude The more intense your workout, even if it’s for a short time, the higher your EPOC.The higher you’re EPOC the more calories from FAT you will BURN