Burning Calories

I often get the question, "How many calories am I burning during this workout?" Unfortunately I don't have an exact number. No one will. Even if you have a heart rate monitor or Body Bug it is all estimation. Even though it is not exact it will get us in the ball park to estimate it. One site I often use to calculate calories burned is http://www.caloriesperhour.com/. You can choose from a large list of activities from vigorous weight training to digging worms (it is on there). This will give you an idea of how many calories you will burn for a given workout. Knowing approximately how many calories you are burning give you an idea of how long it will take to lose weight. If you burn 300 calories each time you workout for 5 days that is 1500 calories. It takes 3500 calories to lose a pound of fat. Now I can determine how long it would take to lose 1 pound if I was eating at my metabolic rate. At this rate it would take about 2 weeks to lose 1 pound.

After exercise we do burn extra calories from our workout too. During exercise we are using energy and oxygen supplies which all need to be restored. This means our metabolism will remain elevated hours after we finished working out. The length of this increase will depend on the intensity. To get an idea you can take the calories burned during the workout and multiply it by .15. So if we burned 300 calories in our workout then we can expect an additional 45 calories burned through this raised metabolism. It is not a huge number but can add up if you are exercising often. The number will increase as the intensity increases.

Mike
www.sandiegopremiertraining.com