Stop burning calories when your body is used to exercise?

sophiedodds104

Once your body is used to exercise will it completely stop burning calories from it or only a certain amount? If so how much less

Faye_Anderson

While it's true that if you do the same exercise over and over you get more efficient at it and therefore burn less you won't ever stop burning calories from doing it. Split up your workouts over a couple of programmes so you're exercising different muscles on alternate days

NerdySamoan

Think of exercise as putting your body under an amount of stress for a period of time.
Your body has alot of smaller stabilizing muscles and movements which are rarely used in nomal everyday life and so when you exercise your body requires more energy than usual to perform these movements and recruits that energy from hopefully fat storages.

Once your body is used to an exercise and can perform it with little effort, then it no longer needs to tap into reserve energy and you will plateau.

Thats usually when you either change your training or nutrition.
If you are long distance cardio, then iits usually a good idea to introduce high intenisity cardio, interval training or weights.

MeanderingMammal

Once your body is used to exercise will it completely stop burning calories from it or only a certain amount? If so how much less

If your only interest is in calorie expenditure then yes, as you lose some weight and adapt to a particular exercise duration and intensity then the amount of calories that you expend will reduce per session. You won't stop expending calories, but the effect will reduce.

To maintain effect you'll always have to keep challenging and increasing the burden, whether that's increasing resistance, increasing intensity or increasing duration.

Clearly there are practical limits on all three of those so there are a number of ways to increase the challenge over time.

Most of my training is running at the moment, so so use that as an example, the practical time limit on my midweek sessions is 90 minutes, including a warm up, cool down and stretching. That means about 60 minutes of actual training. I can work to run faster for that 60 minutes, or build in intervals of maximum exertion with slower recovery pace in between, with one of those sessions taking about 45 minutes all in. At the weekends I'll run for up to three hours. All of those work together, my faster sessions are helped by the interval sessions, and vice versa. My long run can get longer as a result of the other two, which both benefit from the improvements in endurance from the long run.

The other aspect is I'm not doing the same session time and time again, I'm cycling through different types of weeks and improving over time.