How Long Does Your Body Burn Calories After a Workout?

Although most calorie-burn statistics focus on the number of calories burned during a workout, depending on your level of intensity, you can actually burn a significant amount of calories after you leave the gym. Although it's impossible to predict how long after a workout you'll continue to burn calories, more intense workouts will translate to longer periods of post-workout calorie burn. Steady-state cardio is not conducive to an extended afterburn effect, but anaerobic exercise is ideal.

  1. Heart Rate Zones

    • How many calories you burn during a workout depends on the intensity at which you exercise. Anaerobic exercises cause you to burn glycogen stores for instant energy when the amount of oxygen your muscles require exceeds the amount you can take in aerobically. Working out at 80 percent or more of your maximum heart rate will push you past the aerobic zone and into the anaerobic zone, helping you burn more calories during and following a workout. To get a rough estimate of your maximum heart rate, subtract your age from 220.

    EPOC

    • Oxygen is your body's main energy source during and following exercise. Following an intense bout of exercise, you'll experience excess post-exercise oxygen consumption as you are forced to compensate for the oxygen deficit your muscles incurred during your workout. EPOC results in increased calorie burn following a workout, which is one component of the afterburn effect.

    Afterburn Effect

    • According to Dr. Christopher Scott, PHD, an exercise physiology professor at the University of Southern Maine, steady-state cardio workouts do not result in impressive post-workout calorie-burn numbers. According to Dr. Scott, sprinting as fast as you can for five rounds of 30 seconds will result in a greater afterburn effect than jogging for 30 minutes. In addition to EPOC, the lactic acid contribution of exercise is thought to have an effect on the number of calories you burn post-workout. It's difficult to estimate how long you burn calories after a workout, but Scott argues that up to 95 percent of the total calories burned in an anaerobic workout are burned post-workout.

    Muscle and Metabolism

    • Another factor that affects the number of calories you'll burn after a workout is the amount of muscle you carry. Jeff Halevy, a celebrity trainer, says lean muscle mass increases your resting metabolic rate, allowing you to burn more calories when you're not working out. Still, the number of calories you'll burn at a rest won't increase substantially with more muscle, but you may be able to work out more intensely. (Ref. 4)