One of the benefits of exercise is that it burns more calories than sitting around being sedentary.
Low intensity exercise burns more calories than HIIT
This may seem backwards.
But after just a minute or two, you better sit down and rest.
Your calorie burn goeswaydown when youre resting.
Chopping wood with an ax, fast,burns 1,196 calories per hourif you are a 155-pound person.
But who chops wood with an ax, fast, for awhole hour?
You could say the same of running at 10 mph.
Thats the top speed on many treadmills.
Its a pace that is just a few seconds shy of theOlympic marathon qualifying times.
But an hour at 5 mph?
If you weigh more, youll burn more, and if you weigh less, youll burn less.
These numbers will help us compare different activities to each other for the same person.
Calculate your own personal numbershere.
Walking and lifting weights both come in lower on the scale, but theyre still great exercises to do.
Its just a measure of how much work your body is doing.
Importantly, the amount ofworkis not the same as how itfeels.
Remember the example of the all-out HIIT interval that feels awful but ultimately doesnt mean were doing much work.
Lets say youre doing an hour-long outing on your feet every Saturday morning.
At first, you may just be walking, and youll burn 232 calories.
But after a while you start jogging parts of it, and someday soon youre jogging the whole thing.
Thats 563 calories for the hour.
Time passes, and you get fitter.
That said, calorie burn during exercise is only part of the picture.
