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If your goal is to lose fat, counting calories and burning them through exercise is of the utmost importance. If you’re not in a caloric deficit, your fat mass will never decrease. Calories are burned during exercise, but they’re also burned following exercise. After training, your metabolic rate remains elevated for a while (how long depends on exercise intensity and exercise duration); this period of higher metabolic rate plus increased oxygen consumption after exercise is called excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC). It goes without saying that higher intensity and longer duration exercise will keep the metabolic rate elevated longer. The higher the EPOC, the more calories expended. The two main forces driving this process are increased body temperature and active hormones, which keep it elevated as our systems attempt to restore pre-exercise conditions and go back to homeostasis. The hormones are responsible for muscle glycogen restoration and muscle protein resynthesis after exercise. A group of researchers investigated the differences in EPOC between two groups: a group performing one 30-minute exercise session and another performing two 15-minute exercise sessions separated by 6 hours. The subjects cycled at 70 percent of their maximal oxygen consumption (VO2 max). Following the 30-minute session, oxygen consumption was measured for 40 minutes, and following each 15-minute session, it was measured for 20 minutes. The researchers reported a 40 percent increase in oxygen consumption (read: calorie burning) during the split exercise session versus the single exercise session. Therefore, according to this study, you might burn more calories in the long run by splitting your exercise session into two separate ones.

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