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Comment by dave_sullivan | Hacker News Reader

One thing I don't hear mentioned very much w/ exercise and calorie burning is that your body continues burning calories after working out and exercise changes the rate that your body burns calories throughout the day.

For my workouts, I've found sprints and lifting weights on the heavy side to be great because my body spends a lot of energy rebuilding that muscle for a day or two after.

I'd be surprised if baths can change your resting calorie burn rate but I could see them improving circulation and heart health. People should probably still exercise though. Heh, finally I have an excuse to get that jacuzzi in the living room...

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It isn't very much. There are charts that show the post workout calorie utilization, and might was well not bother counting it. And if you are running a caloric deficit anyways, it might actually hurt you since your body cannot repair itself well anyways. Example, if you are trying to keep[ muscle while dieting (in caloric deficit), running and lifting heavy is a way to lose muscle.

Lifting heavy while dieting actually is helpful for not losing muscle, as long as you eat enough protein: http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/early/2016/01/26/ajcn.115....

That actually repeats what I just said. They lifted, but not "heavy" or until failure. And they did HIIT, not long runs. While they are still trying to figure it out, it appears long runs for example tear down muscule tissue and there isn't enough calories in the diet to rebuild.

Apparently it's called "afterburn" and some googling doesn't seem to turn up anything saying it's not a significant effect... In fact, it seems like everyone is saying it's pretty significant (how much exactly being debatable and probably highly influenced by genetics). Where have you heard the opposite?

Every study I've seen says it is a fairly small amount of calories and you should just ignore it when trying to figure out how many calories an exercise burns. Like we know that running faster slightly increases post exercise caloric burn over running slower (on a per mile basis), but we don't bother calculating it in.

> Example, if you are trying to keep[ muscle while dieting (in caloric deficit), running and lifting heavy is a way to lose muscle.

No, that kind of exercise is what you do to assure that you are maintaining muscle in a deficit; not having that kind of exercise and having a calorie deficit is how you lose muscle instead of fat.

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