How Many Calories Are You Burning In Your Workouts???
This is the question I get asked most often.
The short answer is - calorie burn will vary from person to person and workout to workout. I know, not the answer you were looking for. You wanted a number. But, in reality, there is no set calorie burn for X exercise. So many things contribute to your calorie burn in a workout. Time of day, intensity, body composition, working out on empty stomach vs. full stomach, how you slept the night before, etc.
Let me give you an example. I'm currently doing PiYo. One of the workouts in PiYo is called Drench. It's about 48 minutes long. I wear a Polar Heart Rate Monitor when I workout so that I can keep track of my heart rate while working out and the calories I've burned while working out. Two weekends ago, we redid our bedroom (it was a Saturday). My nutrition was crap that day and I totally had a cheat meal of pizza Saturday night. So, when I woke up that Sunday, I was tired, swollen and had indigestion from my indulgences from the night before. All of those things combined contributed to me not feeling so great during my workout and only burning 331 calories in that 48 minutes. Earlier this week, I did Drench again. My nutrition was back on track, I got a good nights sleep the night before and when I woke up, I felt ready to go. This time, when I did Drench, I burned 446 calories. That's a 115 calorie difference - which is HUGE!!! Same person. Same workout. And yet a drastically different calorie burn. So, if calorie burns can differ that much when the same person is doing the exact same workout, imagine how different they can be from person to person.
If you really want to know what you're burning - I suggest investing in something like a heart rate monitor or body bugg type device. I've been using my Polar HRM for about a year and a half now and I love it. There's a certain heart rate range I like to be in - depending on what workout I'm doing - and having something like this enables me to see if I need to be pushing myself harder or scaling it back a bit.
I hope this helps!