Calculating Calories you Burn

by Anonymous

How do you figure out how many calories you burn during exercise?

My Answer

I use to think that the calories readouts displayed in the workout machines (treadmills, stationary bikes....) are quite good estimates of calories burned during exercise.

Well, apparently, they aren't. They are rough estimates. Just that.

For a more accurate calorie reading, you've to take into account the following factors:

1. Your body weight - the heavier and bigger your body size, the more calories you burned.

2. The amount of lean muscle mass you've in your body - the more of it you pack into your frame, the higher your basal metabolic rate (BMR = the state in which you burn off calories while at rest and while you carry out your normal daily activities).

This is because lean muscle mass is metabolically active and you would burn off major portion (about 60 -70%) of your calories through BMR.

How to get more lean muscle mass?

Easy. Do strength training exercises using weights (dumbbells, exercise bands....) or your own body weight.

I've written a page on how to build lean muscle mass in all your major muscle groups here .

3. The type of exercise you do - running? Jogging? Swimming? Biking?

Each exercise burns off different amount of calories.

4. The intensity of your exercise - the higher the intensity, the more calories you'll burn.

For your info, the exercise that can powerfully turbo-charge your body to higher levels of metabolism is cardio exercise.

Higher metabolism enables your body to burn off excess fat calories efficiently, so easier for you to lose the fat and weight.

If you're interested, I've got a chart here showing the number of calories burned for 10 types of exercises, based on 3 body weights (110 lbs, 154 lbs and 198 lbs) .

You can easily have a good estimate of how many calories you burn for each of the listed exercise.