NYTimes article review
Basking in a Workout’s Long, Mysterious Afterglow
It turns out that there is no easy answer to why exercisers feel so warm for hours after finishing a grueling session.
For those of us who exercise you are probably familiar with the heat that continues to radiate off your body long after you've stopped moving and showered. For me, I sometimes feel like I can't cool down...I'll head to work after teaching spin and showering and still be sweating because my core body temp. is still elevated. What's going on here? Is my metabolism still revved? “One thing we know for sure: your metabolism goes sky-high when you exercise,” said Nisha Charkoudian, an associate professor of physiology at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Rochester, Minn. “Then, when you stop, the interesting thing we don’t understand is that your body temperature stays up for about two hours.” The severity of it depends on the intensity of the workout. I'm a beast in spin--I sweat like a pig and work like a race horse...which means my body temp. can become feverish at about 100 degrees. Research on this topic found that the reason the for the feverlike state that arises when the body’s core temperature is elevated: not because you keep burning calories at the rate you did during exercise, but because the body has a hard time getting rid of the extra heat it generated during the exercise session. Heat dissipation is sharply reduced after exercise: for some reason the body just can’t seem to rid itself of the extra heat that it gained. Another thought is that post-workout, the body works to repair subtle tissue damage from strenuous exercise. This ignites the immune system which causes enzymes that repair muscles to require heat-producing energy. Maybe the heat-generating effects of damage repair are the reason?
So what does this mean in terms of calorie burn? Some experts say that once the activity stops your metabolism slows again and no post-workout burn is achieved. Others tell that with intense activity, metabolic rates can go up and remain elevated for seven hours after the session is finished. Even so, the extra calories burned were about 10 percent of the calories burned during the intense exercise. They say that moderate activity is even less impactive.
No matter the cause or the caloric effect, my body temp rises and I'm hot! The one thing I know for sure is that however many calories I burned, whatever heat producing is happening in my body, I worked my muscles and it will thank me in the long run!
Read the full NYTimes article HERE
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