How Many Calories Do I Burn By Running?
I’ve heard on numerous web sites that the speed you run has less to do with calories burned than distance travelled since time spent running tends to balance out the higher burn from faster rates of travel. I decided to get really friendly with the table of calorie coefficients and some Excel formulas to get something approaching a rough answer to the question.
Methodology
From the calorie coefficients, I calculated the calorie expenditure for a set distance of 1 mile for a person weighing 106.3 kg (my current weight, 235 pounds), 90 kg (200 pounds), 80 kg (175 pounds), 70 kg (155 pounds), and 60 kg (132 pounds) for each of the speeds listed in the above link. Why did I choose a mile as my set distance? In the table provided, they include convenient estimated pace per mile for each calorie coeffecient in the running category. Knowing this time made it absurdly simple to calculate out a mile for each speed.
Once I obtained these values, I averaged all the resulting calorie values for each weight per mile run. Then, I converted this value to a per kilometer value by multiplying the result by 0.62137119 (miles per kilometer).
Results
A rule of thumb that you see quite often is that you burn 100 calories for every mile that you run, and this turns out by my calculations to be true…if you weigh about 60 kg (132 pounds).
Average Calories expended per mile:
- 60 kg: 99 kcal/mile
- 70 kg: 115 kcal/mile
- 80 kg: 132 kcal/mile
- 90 kg: 148 kcal/mile
- 106.3 kg: 175 kcal/mile
Now this is all well and good, but it doesn’t work very well for calculations during your long runs. But wait until you see what happens when we convert this value to metric.
Average Calories expended per kilometer:
- 60 kg: 61 kcal/km
- 70 kg: 72 kcal/km
- 80 kg: 82 kcal/km
- 90 kg: 92 kcal/km
- 106.3 kg: 109 kcal/km
That’s right. As a convenient rule of thumb, you burn about 1 calorie per kilogram of your body weight for every kilometer you run. If you run a 5K race, you will burn an amount of calories roughly equal to five times your body weight measured in kilograms.
Keep in mind this is only a convenient rough estimate. But really, isn’t that all you need?
Attention, Geeks!
Tables of my calculations can be found on the Running Calorie Data entry on Digital Alterity Wiki, my personal wiki/homepage.
Technorati Tags: Weight Loss, Geek, Running, Calories