What does it mean to "boost your metabolism"?
I hear this term quite a lot - "if you exercise it will boost your metabolism". The implication generally being that if you do some exercise not only will the exercise burn some calories, but you will also continue to burn more calories throughout the day.
This doesn't make much sense to me. We store calories so that we have some reserves to draw on when needed. If we burn a load of calories, the body wouldn't just think "oh ok, I'll just off load some more for the hell of it". I'm sure it would be the opposite, it would see you exerting yourself and think it would need to hold on to the calories to be used when you exert yourself again.
So, what does boosting your metabolism actually mean?
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There are (at least) two different ways to look at this.
Adding muscle mass => higher basal metabolism
Post-workout metabolic effects
The first one being that the more muscle you have, the more energy your body will demand to maintain itself. You can probably find a basal metabolism rate calculator, and input different values of your weight to see how much difference this would do if you for example were to gain/lose 5 kgs.
The second is another story. Some people hype the post-exercise "burn" coming from for example high intensity interval training. After these types of training, there is a slight elevation in metabolism for a while after the workout. However, this is a lot less than the amount of energy spent in training, thus the post-exersize effect can be considered negligible.
High reps isn't the primary metabolic booster--increased muscle mass is. Increased muscle mass comes from lifting heavy and increasing base strength. HIIT increases mass, ergo resting metabolism.
At the same time, HIIT isn't the only way to increase base metabolism.
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