There are a myriad of excuses for failing to be consistently active, but one of the more difficult obstacles to disprove has been the de-motivating notion that the more you workout, the better your body becomes at conserving the very calories that you are trying to burn. Fortunately, and just in time for those who want to stick to their new year’s resolutions, a new study appears to have busted that myth.
To figure out the relationship between exercise and what experts call the “energy budget,” the new study, published late last year by a top team at Virginia Tech, aimed to find out if exercise causes adaptations within the body that may conserve or slow down the daily calorie burning process. Of course, you’ll often hear people say that the more they exercise, the harder it is to burn fat, and while improved fitness levels mean you become more efficient with the energy you have, there’s more to it than that. When you exercise, you continue to burn more calories than usual, long after the session. This would be futile, however, if the body made up for this by slowing things down later. Fortunately that’s not the case.
How was the study carried out?
For two weeks, 75 participants with a wide-ranging age span of 19 to 63 years of age and with existing levels of physical activity, including those who were sedentary through to ultra-endurance runners, were given a wearable activity sensor. They were then tested regularly on their energy expenditure, using urine samples to give an indication of the relationship between the activity levels they accomplished, and the resulting effects on total calories burned over time. Did those individuals who are consistently active burn less energy overall than those exercising for the first time? Apparently, not.
What were the results?
“Our study found that more physical activity is associated with higher calorie burn, regardless of body composition, and that this increase is not balanced out by the body reducing energy spent elsewhere,” said Kevin Davy, who is a professor in the Department of Human Nutrition, Foods, and Exercise and the principal investigator of the study.
Instead of hoarding energy in one area of the body to make up for the calories burned elsewhere via physical activity, the study actually found that the body continues to function at its usual rate. This means that overall energy use rises in direct response to increased movement. When the body is maintaining basic functions such as breathing, circulating blood, and regulating temperature, the amount of energy used remains stable. In other words, the body does not appear to slow down or cancel out the extra calories burned through activity just because it is getting used to a consistent fitness schedule.
So there you have it. For the majority of us, being consistently active does not appear to be a process that slows down the overall calorie burning process. In that case, you may want to drop this excuse from the list and continue your efforts with that positive change!
