How many calories do I burn while running?;

If you like running and want to calculate the calories you burn while running, you are in the right article.

Nowadays there are many people who choose to exercise at home with their own personal equipment in the safety of their own home, especially in the last couple of years.

Aerobic training is essential in a workout program in any place and for this reason those who have chosen to exercise in their own place have purchased an aerobic machine (treadmill, elliptical, bicycle).

Running and gadgets

In the last decade, outdoor running has become very popular with all ages. Along with the great growth of physical activity, electronics companies are developing products with low cost, which contribute to the monitoring of human vital functions both at rest and during any form of exercise, recording several factors that are useful to us such as heart rate, calories consumed and others with great reliability in the data they provide.

But there are many people who do not own such devices but are interested in knowing the calories they have done during a workout, which is of great importance to them.

The largest health organisations dealing with both physical activity in healthy populations and clinicians, see obesity, type 2 diabetes and others, recommend exercise as a medicine with a minimum ‘dosage’ of 30 minutes of aerobic training three times a week.

Bearing in mind that many of the health problems are due to increased body weight and lack of time due to everyday life, an exerciser can spend enough calories in 30 minutes of aerobic training to reduce his body weight and thus improve his health.

But how many calories do we burn when we run continuously at the same pace?;

The so-called metabolic equivalent MET characterises the rate at which an individual consumes energy both at rest and during exercise with a reference value, conventionally set at 3.5 mL of oxygen per kg per minute.

So for a person who weighs 70 kg, let's see how many calories he or she consumes at rest:

3.5 x body weight /200 = 1.22 calories per minute

The same type does not apply during the exercise as the speed and the slope of the floor play an important role in how many calories will be burned by varying the MET, so based on the following tables we can calculate the caloric expenditure depending on the type of aerobic exercise, the slope of the ground and the time.

To calculate how many calories you burn while running, you can use the following formula.

MET x 3.5 x body weight/200 x time of exercise

Where MET we substitute from the above tables depending on whether we are walking or running.

For example, an exerciser who runs for 30 minutes at 12 km/h and weighs 70 kg will burn up:

12.5 MET x 3.5 x 70 kg /200 x 30 minutes = 459 calories

This way of calculating calories expended through running is an important tool to determine the goal of our training without special logistical means, as it is very reliable and is an aid for both the simple exerciser and the exercise professionals.

By Ioannis Sarris, gymnast