Our body requires a minimum number of calories each day to maintain its vital functions such as breathing, maintaining your heartbeat, and keeping your brain working properly. This minimum number of calories simply to maintain your life is called basic metabolic rate or BMR. In other words, metabolism is the rate at which your body burns calories to sustain life. Several factors influence your basal metabolism like age, height, gender, body composition, environmental temperature and dieting stress. You can also increase your metabolism by changing or controlling many things. One of the main ways is through exercise. Exercise affects the total amount of calories you burn each day and thus affect the rate of metabolism.
Aerobic exercise is known to increase your metabolism in the short term during exercise activity itself as well as in long term, long after the exercise activity has ceased. Aerobic exercise increases metabolic rate in two ways. The first is the actual number of calories you burn while doing aerobic exercise like jogging running or brisk walking. For example, a five mile run might burn 500 calories during the time you are actually running. A second elevation in metabolic rate occurs even after you have stopped exercising. Your metabolic rate could take as long as 12 or more hours to come back to your normal level after exercise. Thus, the metabolism of a resting person who regularly exercises burns more fat even when the person sleeps-than the metabolism of a person who does not exercise. Higher intensity aerobic exercises that use large muscle groups such as your thighs and buttocks will result in a longer elevation in metabolism after you stop exercising.
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