Calories Burned During Exercise

The key to losing weight is to burn more calories than you consume, and while many people count calories to lose weight, they don't know how to figure the calories burned during exercise and other daily activities.

Exercise not only burns calories but it improves your overall well-being. In fact, regular physical activity has been shown to:

• Boost energy so you're less fatigued
• Help people deal with stress
• Improves self-image
• Helps combat anxiety
• Helps fight depression
• Enhances the ability to relax
• Induce better sleep

Determining your activity level will better help you to understand how many calories you should consume, or how much to increase exercise in your daily life if you want to eat more.

• Sedentary: The majority of the day you sit, read, type, watch TV or work on the computer.
• Light Exercise/Activity: Light activity consists of exercise that takes up no more than two hours. This includes things like walking, house cleaning, working in an office, playing baseball, or playing golf. On average, men burn 300 calories per hour and women 240.
• Moderate Exercise/Activity: If you seldom sit thought the day (it takes more calories to stand than to sit), do heavy housework, or enjoy cycling (5.5 mph), gardening, brisk walking (3.5 mph) or playing basketball, as a man you will burn around 460 calories and women will burn 370.
• Very Active: A labor-intensive job that includes physical activity such as construction work or sports like jogging (9 minute mile), mountain-biking, playing football, and swimming are categorized as very active and burn around 730 calories per hour for men and 580 calories per hour for women.

The following information includes numbers of calories burned during exercise including several regular physical activities performed in day-to-day life. These numbers can help you plan your exercise regime and diet based on your weight loss goals. However, as you look at these numbers, one factor to take into consideration is that the number of calories burned can vary based on the size, weight and age of the person exercising as well as environmental elements such as the route you walk. If you live in a flat area, you'll burn less calories than if you walked a route that includes steep hills.

For a 100 percent accurate figure for number of calories burned during exercise, individual physiological testing would have to be performed. However, today, you can find calculator tools online which offer realistic estimates for your caloric needs. The one thing you can know is that the more strenuous the exercise, the more calories you'll burn. This is also true with your daily activity.

The following chart will help you determine how many calories should be eaten based on activity level. For the sake of this chart, female statistics are for a woman 5' 4" and for a man 5' 9".

A variety of online calculators can help you determine your daily caloric needs, while tools such as some heart rate monitors and pedometers are designed to tell you how many calories you've burned. The following links offer more information:

• Heart Rate Monitors
• Pedometer Heart Rate Monitor
• Calorie Calculators

• Pictures of People Exercising
• Women Fitness Models
• Male Fitness Model

• Breast Lifting Exercise
• Contour Abs
• Naked Exercise
• Naked Pilates
• Hula Hoop Exercises

• Online Body Fat Calculators
• Benefits of Exercise with Heart Rate Monitors
• Daily Exercise Chart
• How to Convert Exercise to Calories
• Which Exercises Burn the Most Calories