How Third Space's new Afterburner class can help you to shed calories after you've left the gym

Make your workout last with classes that continue to shed calories long after you’ve left the gym, says Phoebe Luckhurst
Third Space's new Afterburner class
Third Space

Exercise depletes you. Trying something totally new leaves muscles overwrought and seizing, but even your normal routine drains, and therefore legitimises a palliative glass of wine afterwards. The twinges do prove that you’ve done some good — though living out the cliché “no pain, no gain” is about as fun as it sounds, especially when you’re trying to walk downstairs.

Therefore you need to be economical. Keep working out, of course — but since doing so is so unpleasant/boring, ensure you are maximising any possible reward. In which case, the specific effect you are looking for is afterburn, which sounds like it might be catching but is, in fact, a catchy shorthand for “excess post-exercise oxygen consumption”, or EPOC.

Very simply: really hard exercise requires so much oxygen to charge the muscles that, after a while, the demand outstrips the supply. This creates an oxygen debt and, accordingly, your body must work overtime in order to remedy the imbalance. During this debt period you will (imperceptibly) be breathing more quickly, which increases your metabolism, and thereby burn more calories. Or: the higher your resting metabolic rate, the more you can eat every day.

The effects of the best classes can last as long as 36 hours, which means that a couple of 45-minute classes every week could equate to almost a whole week’s worth of exercise (sort of).

Third Space’s new class, AfterBurner, centres on just that. It’s a high- intensity circuit class that its trainer, Luke Barnsley, terms “hardcore”. The 45-minute session, offered at all four of Third Space’s clubs, involves TRX ropes, kettlebells, battle ropes, treadmills and body-weight exercises. Barnsley estimates that the potential afterburn effect of such a class could last as long as two days.

“You’ll lose weight in the first week,” he avows. “You’ll feel better by the second week, and other people will notice by the third week.” Though it takes work — the afterburn effect isn’t a sort of get-out-of-gym-free card. “To get serious results, like the results where people are stopping you and asking ‘What is your secret?!’, takes a bit longer. That’s 12 weeks’ hard graft, with five-plus sessions a week, combined with some stretching/yoga on the off days to keep you mobile.” At which point, presumably, you will really feel the afterburn.

The effects of the class can last for up to 48 hours
Third Space

It is the epoch of EPOC: Project Fit in Cornhill offers interval training that promises to chew through 750 calories during a session, and an afterburn effect that could last as long as three days. Sessions include rounds of hand-held weights, strength exercises and sprints, which sounds suitably unpleasant; the three-day burn is a fair reward. Blok in Clapton’s version is the new class, Cardio Killer, which promises to “burn many calories” as well as stoke the metabolism afterwards.

A single class at Barry’s Bootcamp burns 1,000 calories, and plenty more over the course of the following day, while the Viking Method — the zeitgeist workout that employs movements inspired by the centuries of isolation, cold, enormous volcanic eruptions and hardship endured by ancient Icelanders — promises to “shock the metabolism” and create a burn that will become “addictive”. And Flatline at Gymbox Farringdon — a new class remarkable because it requires participants to sign a death waiver beforehand — has oxygen masks on hand. The routine involves five rounds of circuits (including weighted rope climb, box-jump burpees, high-speed cycling, kettlebell thrusts, sprints), all completed while wearing a 12kg vest. The afterburn is considerable.

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You must eat shortly after a high-burn workout: it sounds counter-intuitive but it’s important not to overdo it any more than you already have done. Furthermore, eating is actually good for the metabolism (praise be), while depriving yourself slackens its pace. Steel yourself for the afterburn.

Follow Phoebe Luckhurst on Twitter: @phoebeluckhurst

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