Calorie Burn During Weight Training

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MrsK912
MrsK912 Posts: 9 Member
in Fitness and Exercise
I am normally pretty good at estimating the number of calories that I burn while I do cardio exercises (I am 5'4, 130 lbs, usually burn about 10 cals a minute for cardio with 160HR). However, I don't have a clue how many calories I burn when I weight train. Today I did a Jackie Full Body Circuit video for 40 minutes. I was not huffing and puffing like I would with a cardio video or running, but my muscles were burning. I didn't have my HR monitor on today, but if I were to guess, my HR was probably 120ish the whole time. So, for weight training do you just estimate burn based on your HR, like you would with cardio? If that's the case, I will be lucky to have burned 200 calories during the 40 minute workout.

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  • brianpperkins
    brianpperkins Posts: 6,124 Member
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    http://myfitnesspal.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/11170-why-don-t-you-calculate-calories-burned-for-strength-training-

    There is no relationship between HR and caloric burn for lifting.
  • SueInAz
    SueInAz Posts: 6,592 Member
    edited January 2015
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    I usually enter about 100 calories for my 45 -60 minute strength training sessions but I know there are plenty of people who don't enter anything at all. You really don't burn a lot of calories doing it and a HRM won't accurately measure it.
  • MrsK912
    MrsK912 Posts: 9 Member
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    Damn! So I can't eat an extra piece of cake just because I did a weight video?! Boo...
    However, I have heard that having more muscle helps you burn more fat throughout the day, which is probably good for you in the long run.
  • japar
    japar Posts: 51 Member
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    HR is a method for understanding cardio pulmonary work and is an indirect measure of calorie burn...whether you are doing cardio or strength training. You do indeed burn calories while lifting (above your BMR) and it does correlate to HR. I have used my Polar in the past for measuring calorie burn for both cardio and strength training and it has proven as a pretty accurate estimation for me. Typical calorie burn for me (210 lb male) in an hour is 300-400 net (above BMR) calories burned.
  • hill8570
    hill8570 Posts: 1,466 Member
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    Circuit training is very dependent on the weights, the exercises, and the rests between sets. For someone as small as yourself, 200-ish gross for 40 minutes is probably in the ballpark. BTW, HR isn't the best indicator of calorie burn when doing weight work -- there's a significant anaerobic component involved.

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