People think about calorie burn in terms of their workouts. An hour at the gym, a run, an Orange Theory class. That is the work. The rest of the day is just the rest of the day.
Here is the problem with that thinking.
Your workout burns somewhere between 300 and 600 calories depending on how hard you push. Meanwhile, everything you do the other 23 hours of the day, fidgeting, walking to your car, taking the stairs, pacing while you’re on a call, standing instead of sitting, burns somewhere between 500 and 1,000 additional calories. Every single day.
This is called NEAT. Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis.
It is the sum of all the physical activity in your day that is not intentional exercise. And for most people, it has a bigger impact on total calorie burn than any workout.
Why Tired People Lose This Battle
When you are exhausted, which we talked about last Thursday in the context of stress and cortisol, your body pulls back on movement without you noticing.
You take the elevator instead of the stairs. You drive somewhere you might have walked. You sit more, slump more, fidget less. You do not make a conscious decision to move less. It just happens. Your body is conserving energy because it does not have any to spare.
Research shows the NEAT difference between a highly active person and a sedentary one can be as large as 700 to 1,000 calories per day. Think about that. Two people doing the same workout can end the day with a 700 calorie gap in total burn based entirely on how much they moved the rest of the time.
When you are tired, stressed, and running on poor sleep, you drift toward the low end of that range without realizing it.
What to Do About It
- Track your steps. A daily step goal is the simplest way to protect your NEAT. Seven to ten thousand steps is a reasonable target. It adds up faster than you think when you are intentional about it.
- Stand up during the workday. Set a reminder to get up every hour. Walk while you take calls. The cumulative effect over a full workday is significant.
- Do not treat your workout as your only move for the day. Getting your gym session in and then sitting for eight hours is not the same as being active.
- Address the root cause of fatigue. If you are too tired to move, the fix is not a stronger pre-workout. It is sleep and stress management. We covered both of those this month for a reason.
More on Thursday about what happens when you try to out-cut the problem by eating less. That one tends to make things worse, not better.
Michael Wilkie
Aspire Health & Fitness