You may have heard of it before — but what is metabolic conditioning? The term has been around for decades, but it only recently crossed over from the world of elite athletes into everyday gyms. It refers to specific exercises designed to consume the maximum amount of calories in a specific amount of time, so it can help you get the most out of a training session. When it’s done correctly, it can increase lean muscle mass, improve the efficiency of the energy pathways in your body and help with faster weight loss.

To help you understand everything you need to know about this form of training, we spoke to an exercise physiologist and combed through the latest research.

What is metabolic conditioning?

Metabolic conditioning (also called MetCon or metabolic training) focuses on increasing the body’s energy delivery and storage during physical activity.

Our bodies produce energy to fuel physical activity through three different biochemical responses in the body:

Immediate response (phosphagen pathway): This provides enough fuel to power the body through high-powered activities for less than 30 seconds.Intermediate response (glycolytic pathway): This fuels moderate exercise lasting up to 4 minutes. Long-term response (oxidative pathway): This gives us enough energy to carry out a low-power activity for several minutes. Metabolic conditioning focuses on the immediate and intermediate pathways, known as anaerobic exercises. These don’t require oxygen to generate energy. However, they’re too high-intensity for the body to sustain for longer than a few minutes. But by crafting a clever workout program, you can tap into these pathways and make your workout more efficient.

Speaking to Live Science, exercise physiologist and Noom Coach Hope Choplin said. “In its simplest terms, metabolic conditioning is simply a pattern of work versus rest periods used to elicit a response that increases the efficiency of any of these energy systems. The workouts utilize exercise to impact both immediate and intermediate body fueling pathways, by leaning into a specific time and intensity interval to help the body more efficiently use energy.”