How Many Calories Burned While Working Out?

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Whether you’re trying to lose fat, gain muscle, or even maintain your weight, chances are your fitness program is going to include at least a couple of forms of exercise. And one of the things you need to keep in mind as you’re laying out your goals and making your plans for reaching them is that working out burns calories.

How many calories will exercising burn?

There isn’t one definitive answer, but there are several factors that influence your energy burn in the gym.

Intensity

Generally speaking, harder or more intense exercise burns more calories than easier or moderate-intensity exercise. If you pick up a weight that you can curl 10 times but put it down after eight reps, not only may you be sacrificing muscle growth, you’re also conserving the calories required to crank out those extra two reps. If you want to maximize calorie burn, you need to find ways to make your exercise harder, not easier, and that includes increasing the total volume lifted (or distance run, etc.) in the same period of time.

Bigger Muscles Burn More Calories

When you’re faced with a choice between two exercises, which should choose? When it comes to burning calories, you should almost always opt for the movement that hits the most muscle mass, because you’re able to lift more weight and contract more muscle fibers. All of that muscular work requires energy, and that means more calories burned. So, if you want to kick-start your calorie burn, opt for squats over curls.

A related idea is that bigger muscles will burn more calories while performing an exercise than will smaller muscles performing the same exercise. Strive to grow your muscles over time, and you’ll end up burning more calories as a natural consequence.

Making an Estimate

The principles of exercise intensity and targeting large muscle groups will get you burning calories at a maximum rate, but it can sometimes be helpful to have hard numbers, even if they’re only estimates.

To help with this, checkout this Calories Burned Chart that will give you the estimated calories burned for each exercise / activity.

Charts like this aren’t perfect, of course, and they can’t take all factors into account, but they can give you a good idea of how to structure your activities in order to burn fat.

The important things to keep in mind are that working out WILL burn significant amounts of calories and that you can influence just how many calories you burn simply by modifying your exercise choices and intensity levels.

Over time, you can hone in on the techniques and movements that work best for you, both for building muscle and for burning fat.