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The skinny on treadmills
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Since the conditions started getting pretty bad here, I decided to join a gym & use the treadmill to keep up my training.
All going well - go every day, longest I've ran on tread has been 10 miles now & generally run my usual 7 miles every night.
However, what's getting to me is how many calories I'm burning on the blasted thing.
If I were keen to lose a few pounds, I'd be over the moon - but I'm not. Each time on the treadmill (if I run 7 miles), I burn somewhere between 740 - 800 calories. Then I'll get on the bike for a bit and burn an extra 300+ calories. That's over 1,000 calories! I'm sure I don't eat my recommended 2,000 calories daily so I really can't afford to be burning 'em off at this rate.
I thought running for an hour generally burnt 500/600 calories? Obviously it's going to vary depending on the individual & speed/intensity of the run, but 800 calories does seem a tad excessive.
My average m/m on the treadmill is 7/40 & I only have the incline set on 1 to mimic outside terrain.
Currently, I weigh 126 pounds (BMI 21) but I really don't want to weigh less than that otherwise I'll start looking gaunt.
My weekly mileage (on the tread) last week was 46 miles, I also biked 30 miles or so. I'm going to have to start training for Rotary Shakespeare Marathon soon too but dread to think how many calories I'd burn if I were mixing in LSRs with treadmill work!
Anyone else experience this bizarre calorie burning on a treadmill/in the gym in general as opposed to out on the roads?
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Comments
They aren't accurate at speed or distance, they are even worse at calorie calculation.
Rule of thumb, 100cals per mile, regardless of outside or treadmill.
Only those who lose weight look at the calorie counter. Why do you think so many go
to gyms. They need to know how much they losing in order to qualify for a Big Mac.
Machines can't figure out how many calories or fat you losing. Its gives you a idea in
your head and more a false one.
Simple physics.
As Dan says ~100 cals per mile. The only factor that will alter this (on the flat) is your Mass (or for the lay person 'weight'). If you are 'heavier' you require more energy to move...as you have a greater mass. I weight about 165lbs and use about 125 cal/mile I believe. There is a calorie counter on the RW site somewhere that does the sums for you.
This ~100 cal is the same whether you walk or sprint, given you are moving the same object the same distance.
Going uphill will increase things slightly, as you have to fight gravity.
im out of here.
The easiest way to show how inaccurate the calorie count is would be to wear your HR monitor while you're on there, and compare the two calorie measurements. I bet they'll be way out. IMO this is one of the main reasons that calorie counting is doomed to failure. How can you truly know how many calories are going in or coming out?
Eat healthy stuff, eat when you're hungry and refuel after exercise. Simple!
Sounds about right - roughly 100 cals per mile is what is usually quoted. Speed doesn't usually make too much difference as although you are burning at a faster rate, you don't do it for as long.
Bet you'd be burning more running outside at the moment though - especially if you cut down on your clothing, just to keep warm.
Most things I've read seem to suggest that a BMI of about 22 is the best for overall health, though many athletes are below that. Down to about 19 is considered pretty healthy, so you are well withing the healthy range.
As Philpub says I wouldn't look at the calorie counters. Just keep a weekly check on your weight, doing at the same time of day & same conditions - eg. just after going to loo etc. If it starts to change by more than 2 or 3 pounds, particularly a trend over a few weeks, either eat a bit more or a bit less. Alternatively you could increase or decrease your training.
I use rough rule of thumb that 100 calories/mile works out for a 10st individual, so you can estimate accordingly. So FWIW, D2D (9 stone) is probably burning about 90 calories/mile, which would equate to ~700 cal/hr on the treadmill @ 7:40/m (7.8M x 90 = 702)
But yes, at the end of the day the weighing scales, mirror and waist measurement are all you need to keep an eye on. And race times of course, that's the most important thing.
It's surely a case of just disciplining yourself to run at the correct speeds? No doubt your marathon time would come down significantly if there were more disparity between workout speeds.
I know this is closely held belief amongst runners but I thought this myth had been debunked by research. i.e. it is actually true that the faster you cover a mile the more energy you will burn.
There is a calorie burnt calculation on RW somewhere - as they say - 100 calories a mile ish. It SHOULD be simple for a tready to work that out accurately, but all exercise equipment seems to overcalculate - maybe they choose to believe a higher calculation ?
Yes, "the 100 calories burned per mile wether you walk or run" is just not true.
It is not surprising that lots of people believe it because you see it written all over the place including running magazines (but surely not RW though).
The number of calories you burn depends on your weight and your speed. It is important to remember that you would have burned some calories if you had been sat on the sofa so it is the difference between the calories burned whilst running/walking and the calories you would have burned anyway that is important.
Have a look at this article:
"Their male subjects burned 105kcal running, 52 walking; the women, 91 and 43. That is, running burns twice as many calories net per mile as walking, and since you can run two miles in the time it takes to walk one mile, running burns four times as many calories net per hour as walking."Running, Walking and Calories
Moraghan - I dont know. I was going to mention the 'afterburn' thing....but cougie beat me to it. To my mind it makes logical sense that to move any object (i.e. you) a given distance requires the same energy irrespective of whether you do it quickly or slowly. I did have a look for the physics on it....but not being a physcicisticisticist I wasnt really sure what to look for. Mass/distance/force all that stuff.
However, if I am more than happy to be corrected if this isnt the case.
...and indeed Kryten comes up with the goods.
Thanks!
*need to be a subscriber though
RW US still have their calories burned calculator up :
http://www.runnersworld.com/cda/caloriecalculator/0,7153,s6-242-306-313-0-0-0-0-0,00.html
I agree that weight plays a part - the heavier you are, the more calories you will burn, but the rough figure of 100 calories a mile isnt far out for the average person.
I'm not sure what that RW article says precisely, but we all know how one report seems to contradict another - sometimes even in the same issue !
I'm sticking with the original way of thinking until theres a bit more evidence for running burning a lot more calories than walking - it just seems a "bit too good" that running a mile uses twice as much calories as walking ?
Sorry, I didn't realise it was subscribers only.
Would it be really naughty to copy and paste the whole article to here?
I wont say anything! 'It will be our little secret' (bonus points if anyone knows the film that is from!)
perhaps check the terms and conditions?.....or not.
<cough>
Enduring Questions: Running, Walking and Caloriesby Amby Burfoot
A few months ago I had an argument with someone who's far cleverer than I am. I should have known better, but you know how these things go. Needless to say, I lost the argument. Still, I learned something important in the process. David Swain is a cyclist who likes to ride extreme distances. Since I spend most of my time on my feet, I assumed I could teach him something about walking and running. Perhaps I should have paid more attention to Swain's PhD in exercise physiology and his work on "Metabolic Calculations".Both Swain and I are interested in fitness and health, which makes walking and running great subjects for discussion. They are far and away the leading forms of human movement. Every able-bodied human learns how to walk and run without instruction. The same cannot be said of activities such as swimming, cycling, football, and golf. This is why walking and running are the best ways to get in shape, burn calories and improve your health.
Our argument began when I told Swain that walking and running burn the same number of calories per mile. I was absolutely certain of this fact for two unassailable reasons: (1) I had read it a billion times; and (2) I had repeated it a billion times. Most runners have heard that running burns about 100kcal a mile, and since walking a mile requires you to move the same weight over the same distance, walking should also burn about 100kcal a mile. Sir Isaac Newton said so. Swain was unimpressed by my GCSE physics. "When you perform a continuous exercise, you burn five calories for every litre of oxygen you consume," he said, "and running in general consumes a lot more oxygen than walking."
I was still gathering my resources for a retort when a new article crossed my desk, and changed my cosmos. In "Energy Expenditure of Walking and Running," published last December in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, a group of researchers at Syracuse University in the USA measured the actual calorie burn of 12 men and 12 women while running and walking 1,600 metres on a treadmill. The result was that the men burned an average of 124kcal while running, and just 88 while walking; the women burned 105 and 74. (The men burned more than the women because they weighed more.) Swain was right. The investigators at Syracuse didn’t explain why their results differed from a simplistic interpretation of Newton’s Laws of Motion, but I figured it out with help from Swain and Ray Moss, another exercise physiologist. Running and walking aren’t as comparable as I had imagined.
...
...
When you walk, you keep your legs mostly straight, and your centre of gravity rides along fairly smoothly on top of your legs. In running, we actually jump from one foot to the other. Each jump raises our centre of gravity when we take off, and lowers it when we land, since we bend the knee to absorb the shock. This continual rise and fall of our weight requires a tremendous amount of Newtonian force (fighting gravity) on both take off and landing.
Now you understand why running burns 50 per cent more calories per mile than walking, I hate to tell you that it’s a mostly useless number. Sorry. We mislead ourselves when we talk about the total calorie burn (TCB) of exercise rather than the net calorie burn (NCB). To figure the NCB of any activity, you must subtract the resting metabolic calories your body would have burned during the duration of the session, even if you had never forced yourself off the sofa.
You rarely hear anyone talk about the NCB of workouts, because this is Britain, damnit, and we like our numbers big and bold. Subtraction is not a popular activity. Certainly not among the weight-loss gurus who want to promote exercise schemes. "It’s bizarre that you hear so much about the gross calorie burn instead of the net," says Swain. "It could keep people from realising why they’re having such a hard time losing weight."
Thanks to the Syracuse researchers, we now know the relative NCB of running a mile in 9:30 versus walking the same mile in 19:00. Their male subjects burned 105kcal running, 52 walking; the women, 91 and 43. That is, running burns twice as many calories net per mile as walking, and since you can run two miles in the time it takes to walk one mile, running burns four times as many calories net per hour as walking.
I didn’t come here to bash walking, however. Walking is an excellent form of exercise that builds aerobic fitness, strengthens bones, and burns lots of calories. A study released in early 2004 showed that the Amish (the Pennsylvania-based religious group that eschew many modern conveniences) take about six times as many steps per day as adults in most American communities, and have about 87 per cent lower rates of obesity.
In fact, I had read years ago that fast walking burns more calories than running at the same speed. Now was the time to test this hypothesis. Wearing a heart-rate monitor, I ran on a treadmill for two minutes at three miles per hour (20 minutes per mile), and at 3.5, 4.0, 4.5, 5.0, and 5.5mph (10:55 per mile). After a 10-minute rest to allow my heart rate to return to normal, I repeated the same thing walking. Here’s my running versus walking heart rate at the end of each two-minute stint: 3.0 (99/81), 3.5 (104/85), 4.0 (109/94), 4.5 (114/107), 5.0 (120/126), 5.5 (122/145). My conclusion: running is harder than walking at paces slower than 12-minutes-per-mile. At faster paces, walking is harder than running.
How to explain this? It’s not easy, except to say that walking at very fast speeds forces your body to move in ways it wasn’t designed to move. This creates a great deal of internal "friction" and inefficiency, which boosts heart rate, oxygen consumption, and calorie burn.
The bottom line is that running is a phenomenal calorie-burning exercise. In public-health terms – that is, in the fight against obesity – it’s even more important that running is a low-cost, easy-to-do, year-round activity. Walking doesn’t burn as many calories, but it remains a terrific exercise. As David Swain says, "The new research doesn’t mean that walking burns any fewer calories than it used to. It just means that walkers might have to walk a little more, or eat a little less, to hit their weight goal."
<end cough>
This thread has moved fast.
As well as fairly well publicised differences between walking and running there is research to support differences in calories burnt at different running speeds per mile.
Has anyone else tested this as well ? Remember the case of the scientists who discovered Cold Fusion in their lab - but nobody else had been able to recreate it ?
I'd sum this up as running does burn more calories than walking per hour. Nobody can deny that eh ?
They set fire to them with a bunson burner, then measure how much hotter some water gets, at least thats what we used to do to find the calories in a peanut.
Hope that answers your question!