Sprinting & Fat Loss

Sprinting & Fat Loss

I want our team to do more sprinting. But first, I want to give you a few reasons why! Hopefully it gives you some sort of solace in the midst of the discomfort that most assuredly comes with sprinting. And if while you’re sprinting or doing high intensity work, and you don’t feel any discomfort, you’re not doing it right.

There are many benefits, both mentally and physically, to working out, and especially, sprinting. When I create workouts, I like to limit my people to an hour at a time so it’s important to give you the most efficient and beneficial workout in that time period. Doing sprints is perfect because even a few high intensity sprint sessions have many short and long term benefits for you.

Let’s focus on two.

I’m not going to touch on the other areas in which you will experience benefits, such as endurance, neurological, coordination, cardiovascular, etc. So lets learn more about: Protein Synthesis and then I’ll tell you about EPOC (Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption).

Protein Synthesis — Sprinting enhances this process by 230%

What is it?

Think of a metabolism for muscle growth, or more appropriately, anabolism, which is constructive metabolism. We’re growing stuff! It’s an insanely difficult cell molecular process involving many words that you’ll stop reading if I start to mention them. (Image below. What is this?!)

Essentially, your muscles need to grow, repair, and prepare for the next time you do this crazy exercise stuff. Take our HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) workouts, or our strength training workouts. These are hard! And when you are finished this protein synthesis process starts to do its job. What it’s doing is taking essential amino acids (EAA), to build and repair the muscles you demolished during your training. (The building of muscle is based on tearing muscle fibers and letting them repair themselves in order to grow). This process will always be occurring, but what if we could add jet propulsion to it? Sprinting does that!!

Why do you care?

So protein synthesis is ONE way you’ll be burning calories and becoming lean just because the body will be working to perform this proces, thus burning energy and fat.

So then another way to become lean from sprinting and protein synthesis is actually through just HAVING MORE MUSCLES.

If sprinting ENHANCES the muscle building process, what are the benefits of actually having more muscle?

1. The ability to do more! The more you can do, the more calories you can burn, the longer you can work out, and the better you feel about the progress you’ve made.

But also:
2. Metabolism! This process is based primarily on how much muscle we carry. Here are some interesting numbers that show how many calories are burned just from resting muscles:

● 1 additional pound of muscle burns 50 calories a day. You can burn all those calories doing nothing!

● This is equivalent to 18,250 calories a year or 5 lbs of fat

● So, if you gain and maintain 5 lbs of muscle, you will potentially burn 26 lbs over the course of a year.

EPOC (Excess Post-exercise Oxygen Consumption)

What is it?

How much oxygen you consume during exercise is an indicator of how long it will take for your body to get back to pre-exercise state….where it wants to be. Studies have shown that the intensity of the workout determines the length of the EPOC effect. It could take 15 minutes or up to 48 hours depending on your fitness level.

Why do you care?

In order to get back to resting state, your body is burning calories…while you’re doing nothing! Well what’s it doing?

1. Replenishing oxygen stores — the body stores oxygen in lungs, muscles, blood, and other tissues.
2. Lactate removal — Your body is removing this and converting it into fuel.
3. ATP resynthesis — Your muscles have stores of energy ready to go, after you use this energy the body must restore it.
4. Glycogen Restoration — Muscles also have stores of glucose ready for energy. Again, once you use this, your body works to restore it .
5. Decrease body temperature — Exercise increases your temperature and the body has to work to get back to normal.

There has been a lot of research done to quantify the legitimacy of EPOC. Basically most of it says, the more intense and longer your workout, the more fat burning benefits you’ll get from EPOC. But, it’s not the holy grail of fat loss.

• Even if you maximize your post-workout burn, you’re still only looking at an additional calorie burn of about 6–15% of your during-workout burn.
• If your workout burned about 400 calories, EPOC would only account for an additional calorie burn of about 24 to 60 calories.

So it’s not going to happen over night, but you can see just how, over the course of time, intense workouts and SPRINTING can have an amazing effect on fat loss.

So when I say, “Let’s do some sprints!” You’ll respond with a “Let’s crush it!”

Acknowledgements:

– Active.com, Rachel Cosgrove, The Myth of the Fat Burning Zone

– Resistance Training and EPOC, Jeffrey Reynolds and Len Kravitz Ph.D,

– Burleson, M.A. et al. 1998. Effect of weight training exercise and treadmill exercise on elevated post-exercise oxygen consumption. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 30, 518–22.