Burn calories without breaking a sweat: use these seven tips to make your metabolism work overtime even while you're resting

Men's Fitness, April, 2003 by Andrea Platzman

Try power yoga for metabolism-boosting exercise combined with an emphasis on proper breathing. Bring plenty of water to class, as this is not the relaxing brand of yoga you may be familiar with.

BRICKS IN YOUR METABOLIC WALL

Your metabolism is actually made up of several components, each one responsible for burning a percentage of your daily caloric intake:

* Dietary thermogenesis refers to how many calories you expend eating and digesting food. This effect burns 10 percent of everything you eat.

* Adaptive thermogenesis is the fancy name for daily activities such as fidgeting during a boring meeting, using the bathroom, and walking to your car. This accounts for another 10 percent of your daily calories.

* Then there's exercise. Your sweaty efforts take care of between 15 percent and 30 percent of total calories, depending on how hard and long you work out.

* Your resting metabolic rate is probably the most significant facet of metabolism. RMR refers to how many calories you burn just sitting there reading this article. "Your RMR utilizes 60 to 75 percent of your total metabolism," says exercise physiologist J.T. Kearney, Ph.D. "Basically, you burn three times as many calories doing absolutely nothing compared to doing what you choose to do purposely.'" In other words, you burn more calories in the 23 hours a day you're not exercising than in the hour you spend at the gym.

Several factors influence your RMR: genetics, age, gender and, most importantly, your muscle-to-fat ratio, otherwise known as "body composition." Your RMR already uses up several hundred calories a day, but your goal is to increase that number as much as possible.

SUPERCHARGE YOUR METABOLISM

"To really boost your metabolism, aerobic activity is necessary," says John Jay Wooldridge, a Reebok master trainer. He recommends doing at least 20 minutes, three to five times a week. Beginners should aim for 55 percent to 85 percent of their maximum heart rate; cardio veterans should shoot for 75 percent to 85 percent of their MHR. (To determine your approximate MHR, subtract your age from 220.)

While cardio offers a valuable path to spiking metabolism, "the biggest impact on metabolic rate is the proportion of muscle mass per unit of body weight," says Dan Benardot, Ph.D., R.D., author of Nutrition for Serious Athletes. Since energy is required to maintain muscle mass, the more muscle you have, the more calories your body will burn. Muscle is eight times more metabolically active than fat. To be precise, you'll burn about 50 calories a day for every one pound of muscle mass you're carrying. Wooldridge recommends doing a minimum of two resistance-training sessions a week.

YOUR PERSONAL PLAN

Weight loss is a simple matter of burning more calories than you eat. But what if you want to know how many calories you burn in one day? Try the BodyGem by HealtheTech, a handheld portable device that measures your resting metabolic rate, which accounts for as much as 75 percent of the calories you burn a day. (Once you figure out your RMR, it's easy to compute what you expend through exercise and activity to then find your daily caloric-burn total.) The seven-to-nine-minute test is administered by simply having you breathe into the device through a disposable mouthpiece. Once you have a measurement, you carl create a personalized weight-loss plan. For a quick-and-dirty estimate of your RMR, go to www.bodybuilding.com/fun/calrmr.htm.>