Post HIIT calorie burn

You can't use a HRM to estimate EPOC, so none of your numbers mean anything. Whatever accuracy HRMs have (and it's much less than people think), it's only applicable during specfic types of cardio exercise (steady-state cardio, at moderate to medium intensities). As you get farther away from that "standard", the accuracy steadily decreases.


That being said, there is a higher calorie burn after doing HIIT, compared to lower-level, moderate duration endurance cardio. A higher post-exercise "burn" is not necessarily siginifcant, however. Overall, post exercise calorie burns are not that great under any circumstances.

The important thing is total calories burned. Some people will claim that certain exercises "burn calories for 24 hours after the workout". While that may be true by a strict laboratory definition, it doesn't mean that much if the total burn is only 100-125 calories. It is difficult to determine precise EPOC numbers, since there are so many variables involved. A meta analysis done several years ago looked at many studies performed on the subject and concluded that the average post-exercise calorie burn following HIIT was 14% of total calories burned during the workout, for endurance cardio about 7%. I urge caution with those numbers, only because the research was reported at least 5 years ago and the author looked at even earlier studies. This is an area that has been more heavily researched in recent years and more labs are using more sophisticated techniques, so I suspect those numbers will evolve in the future.

And HIIT is not the only way to achiever a higher post-exercise calorie burn. Longer endurance workouts (e.g. 60-90 min) and high-intensity steady-state workouts can also give you a longer burn.

In any case, as I mentioned earlier, the overall effect is not that great under any circumstances. I personally would not recommend that someone structure a workout solely on the expectations of some theoretical EPOC.