How many calories does your exercise burn off?

Calculate the number of calories you need to burn

The importance of a nutritionist

For HIIT weight training to be effective it’s important to know how to calculate the number of calories we need to burn from exercising in order to lose or maintain ideal weight.

With help from your doctor or a nutritionist you can determine how many calories you are currently consuming and how many you will need to consume each day to reach your weight loss goal.

I am not a dietician and therefore not qualified to give professional advice, however,  based on personal experience and talking to other trainers and exercisers – we can get a good start to a leaner body by knowing how to calculate calories consumed.

As a first step – I would encourage you to visit with a dietitian . . . . whether in person or online. One I use on occasion is My Fitness Pal. They can establish a proper diet to follow each day which will take the guess work out of planning your daily meals.

Secondly, it’s a good idea to start keeping a food journal where you can log your daily food intake. Your dietician will probably advise you to do this anyway. In doing this you can clearly see what foods are sabotaging your diet.  This will make it easy for you to track the number of calories consumed each day and adjust accordingly.  Product labels make this easy to do. In addition, you can find calorie-counting tools on-line- such as those on Dr. Atkins’ site – to help with this.

If you are taking in 3000 calories per day and you want to loose weight then cut your caloric intake by 500 per day. This averages to be 2000 – 2500 less calories consumed per week just from adjusting your diet. When you add an effective exercise program like HIIT weight training you will be amazed at the amount of weight you will lose.

The METs value of an activity

To determine how much you need to exercise in order to loose weight you will want to figure out the amount of energy  a particular exercise uses up in a certain amount of time. One way of doing this is to use metabolic equivalent units of an activity or METs (Metabolic Equivalent of Tasks) as it is more commonly referred to. It can also be defined as multiples of your resting metabolic rate or (RMR).

Your RMR is the number of calories you use while resting (e.g. sitting quietly reading a book or watching TV or lying in bed). The resting metabolic rate for the average person is one calorie per kilogram of body weight per hour. (A kilogram is 2.2 pounds.). In terms of oxygen used, it is 3.5 milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute.

N.B. If you burn more calories than the average person then you have a high metabolism and conversely if you burn less then you have a low metabolism.

How much calories does your exercise burn up?

Scientists have devised the following formula to calculate the amount of calories burned during an activity:

1 calorie per minute = METS x Body Wt. (kilogram) x 3.5 (constant)/200 (constant).

(To convert pounds to kilograms, simple divide your body weight by 2.2. For example, if you weigh 170 pounds your weight would be 77.3 Kg (170 Lbs / 2.2 = 77.3 Kg).)

Let’s say, for example, you were interested in swimming laps at a moderate rate for exercise. We will calculate the number of calories that a 170 Lb man would burn per minute based on the following:

1) Body weight of 170 pounds or 77.3 kilograms

2) The metabolic equivalent unit of swimming laps at a moderate rate is 8. This can be found by reviewing a MET chart.

Appling these numbers to the formula shows that you would burn 10.8 calories per minute (8 x 77.3 x 3.5 / 200 = 10.8).

If your goal is to burn-up 2000 calories per week you can easily figure out how much you need to exercise each day to meet that goal. Do this by taking your weekly goal of 2000 and divide by 10.8 calories to determine how many minutes you must exercise each week to meet your goal. In the example above it would be 185 (2000/10.8) minutes or a little over three hours per week. You then take the number of minutes per week and divide it into daily exercise sessions.  So if you plan to exercise 5 days per week it would average out to 37 minutes per day. These minutes can be cut in half by doing HIIT weight training.

Combine the above caloric expenditure with a proper diet and nutrition program and in 6 to 8 weeks you can transform the way your body looks now into the new you.

If you can reduce your caloric intake by 400-500 per day, and burn 300 or more per day by exercising for five days each week, you would lose 1 – 2 pounds per week.  Don’t expect to lose more than this.  You didn’t gain the extra weight quickly, so you shouldn’t lose it as fast as many diet plans would have you believe.

I want to encourage you to become involved in some form of organized sporting activity.  It should be an activity that is challenging and fun to do – such as cycling, self-defense, speed walking, shuffleboard, golfing or even billiards. The time you spend exercising should be geared to preparing your for this sporting event.

In training for this event you will include HIIT weight training to improve your movement and strength. You will be amazed at how quickly you will become good at this activity. Work the muscles needed to excel in this activity in order to be really competitive.

To a healthier you