Weight Loss and Control

Excess Post-exercise Oxygen Consumption “EPOC”          

            When the average person thinks about martial arts, due to bad marketing, they normally think about self-defense only.

Martial arts (excuse the pun) beats almost every other standard exercise as a mechanism for weight loss.

Here is why:

Counter to aerobics, martial arts workouts are anaerobic a process which throws your body into oxygen debt. This process is crucial to converting the nutrients that you consume into adenosine triphosphate (ATP) the fuel your body needs for muscular activity; because of it, much like how coals are still hot hours after the flame is put out on a grill, your body will continue to burn calories long after the workout is finished, sometime for days.

This physiological effect is called Excess Post-exercise Oxygen Consumption and is a standard byproduct of vigorous martial arts workouts.

How do martial arts compare to other weight loss programs?

Walking:

            Walking is a major form of exercise for many adults because it is easy, convenient, and you do not have to learn anything.

As a weight loss program, walking rates at the bottom of the list. Mainly because most people walk at a comfortable pace; a pace that they can have a conversation.

Walking does not burn excessive amounts of calories. In fact, most of the exercise that comes from walking is based on the terrain.

 Walking mainly benefits the heart. You would have to walk over an hour to burn a modest number of calories.

Walking is not even in the same league as a martial arts workout.

Biking:

            Though biking is better than walking, at a comfortable pace you would have to put a lot of miles into a biking workout to get the same benefits that a martial arts workout would give.

To burn the same number of calories biking as a martial arts workout in a comparable  amount of time you would have to bike very fast up and down the Shenandoah Mountains for a mile or more.

Swimming:  

In the grand scheme of things, as an exercise swimming is the only exercise that comes close to challenging martial arts as a weight loss program and that is only if you swim sprints. The reason for this is that to swim you must use all your muscles like in martial arts.

            Additionally, when you swim sprints, you develop EPOC!

Aerobics

            The way aerobics works is this: For the first twenty minutes of exercise, you are in the “warm-up” phase and are mainly getting a heart workout.

After twenty minutes your body begins to burn carbohydrates; approximately a half of an hour into your workout your body starts to burn fat calories.

Aerobic workouts tend to burn calories during the workout, not after.

Martial arts workouts tend to burn the same number of calories in ten minutes that it takes the average person doing aerobics to burn in an hour; the same number of calories in an hour that it would take someone doing aerobics to burn in a couple of days.