While on the quest for fat loss, many people place far too much focus on how many calories they are burning during their exercise sessions, while forgetting to account for the calories that will be burned because of that exercise session — after all is said and done. If you train in the proper way, you can actually greatly enhance the total amount of fat burned with your exercise program by taking advantage of these additional calories lost after the training program is completed.

These calories are collectively known as Excess Post-exercise Oxygen Consumption (EPOC). What this basically represents is how many additional calories your body will burn after the exercise session has been completed in order to return your body to the state it was in before the exercise took place.

This will include a variety of different processes that are related to recovery, such as increasing the amount of muscle glycogen contained in the muscle that’s been depleted during the workout, restoring the blood lactate levels to normal and bringing down the heart rate and body temperature.
what affects epoc?

If your goal is to achieve a maximum fat loss, you will want to optimize EPOC as best as you can, thereby increasing the total number of calories you burn that day.

The degree of EPOC you experience has a direct correlation to the intensity of your workout session. The harder you are able to work out, the more you will disrupt all the measures listed above and, therefore, the more energy your body will need to expend to bring them back down to normal once again.

Furthermore, there are certain variables within your workout that you can alter to get that “after burn” up even higher:

Rest periods
When trying to maximize EPOC, taking slightly shorter rest periods will help. This forces your body to work harder without as much recovery between sets, so you will require more in-depth recovery after the session has been completed.

You don’t want to take it so far that you sacrifice your ability to lift heavy weights, because that, as you will learn, also increases EPOC.