If you’re focused in on weight loss, you may have run across articles about programs where you burn 1000 calories in one workout. Is that at all possible. Well it is, but for a select few and not for everyone. Sometimes, it’s all about the math, where the calorie burning numbers come from a five-minute segment of the workout, then applied to every minute of the workout. If that short five minute segment has you burning 100 calories, then it’s deduced that 50 minutes would have you burning 1,000. However, the intensity doesn’t stay the same throughout that full 50 minutes. If it did, most people would have to quit midstream.
Your gender and body composition makes a difference in how many calories you burn.
No matter how much it’s protested, when it comes to losing weight, men have all the luck. That’s because men burn more calories doing the same activity as women. It comes from Mother Nature endowing them with more muscle mass, which grows even faster than women’s muscle mass when they’re both in a program of exercise. If you compared a man with a woman after one year of weight training, a man would have put on six to nine more pounds of muscle mass doing the same thing, including expending the same effort. Women tend to start out with less muscle, and the more muscle you have, the more calories you’ll burn. So their normal body composition works against them when it comes to burning that 1,000 calories.
Other factors determine how many calories you’ll burn.
Age plays a big role in how many calories you burn, so does how much you weigh and your genetics. The older someone is, the harder it is to build muscle and burn calories. That means not only will it take longer to build, but an older person will burn fewer calories while working out. Your present weight makes a difference. Think of carrying that extra 20 to 30-pounds like carrying a barbell or dumbbell of the same weight as you workout. You’d definitely burn more calories. Even genetics can work for you or against you when it comes to burning calories.
How intense the exercise is does make a difference.
As noted before, it’s all about the math. If the 1,000 calorie burner is based on an intense portion of the workout, then the calories burned will seem higher, even though it’s a false assumption. Choosing workouts that burn more calories such as weight training, will improve the number of calories burned, but it won’t get you to the 1,000 per workout if you’re the average person. That’s even when you’re going at it hard, with few breaks and heavier weight. However, it will burn more than a less intense workout.
- Types of workouts that burn a high amount of calories include HIIT—high intensity interval training—circuit training, intense cardio and kettlebells. While they may not burn 1,000 calories a session, you’ll still get many benefits.
- No matter how many calories you burn in a workout, you still have to eat healthy to lose weight. If you go to the gym, burn 1,000 calories and then eat a supersized double Big Mac meal that has 1580 calories, you’d still gain weight.
- Sprint interval training is another way to burn a lot of calories. You use a treadmill and vary your speed with fast walking, sprinting, back to fast walking and then cool down. You can use a weightlifting HIIT workout that provides afterburn, too.
- I not only help my clients with the workouts that will burn maximum calories, but also help them learn a healthy way of eating to reduce the caloric intake and lose weight faster.