Calories Burned through Exercise

In order to calculate our output, we have to know the calories burned by various activities. Everything we do from sitting in an office (100 calories / hour) to running a marathon (850 calories / hour) burns energy in the form of calories. Your fitness plan will need to offset the balance of input and output to arrive at your goal.

Sometimes I’ll use an elliptical machine at the gym or home. Both have a calorie calculator on them, but one seems to show me a number almost 2x higher than the other?! Just like calculating your BMI, the calories burned by various activities can vary significantly by your age, weight, gender, and individual metabolism. You’ll be able to better gauge actual numbers as you measure your weight in conjunction with your food and activity logs.

The two calculators below approximate the calories you burn in various activities. The first one use mileage from running; the second one uses minutes of various activities.

This calculator (below) calculates calories burned by running distance. For my food / exercise log, I usually just use 100 calories / hour as the rate of calories burned for my workouts. Remember to keep it simple - once you’re more comfortable with calories eaten and burned, you can save time by rounding off. You’ll know if you’re being too generous or harsh by the measurements!

This next calculator (below) includes more than 20 activities. Enter in your information and it will calculate the approximate calories that you'll burn for this exercise / activity. If you don’t see your activity on the choice list, approximate it based on what’s available (Ex: Use ski-machine to approximate actual cross-country skiing, etc..).