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Calorie & Exercise Chart

Losing weight typically means modifying your diet (both the types of foods eaten and the quantity) and getting regular exercise. Cutting calories alone is rarely enough; exercise helps you burn the excess calories you can't cut out of your diet, and it helps you maintain the weight you lose. Your general health will benefit too, of course. There are numerous calorie and exercise charts available online to help you track your progress.

  1. Chart Organization

    • Calorie and exercise charts are usually organized by an individual's weight. For example, the top of the chart will give three weights: 130 pounds, 155 pounds and 190 pounds. Below each weight is the number of calories burned during one continuous hour of a particular exercise listed alphabetically on the left side of the chart. To use the chart, find the weight that matches yours most closely and the type of exercise you are doing to find the estimated number of calories that you will burn in 1 hour.

    Exercises

    • Some charts give hundreds of exercise options, including variations of each exercise. For example, instead of simply listing "swimming," a chart may list "Swimming laps, freestyle, fast, vigorous effort" and "Swimming laps, freestyle, light/moderate effort," providing calorie information for both. Other charts include daily activities like sweeping, walking and scrubbing floors. The more extensive charts include less common exercises like rugby, whitewater rafting and hacky sack.

    Calories

    • How many calories you burn during 1 hour of a particular exercise is highly subjective. Your body weight, the intensity of the exercise, your calorie intake, your general conditioning level and your metabolism all affect the figure. Therefore, calorie and exercise charts are meant to be used as guides only. They give you a rough idea of how many calories you may be burning while performing an exercise; you may be burning many more or fewer.

    Benefits

    • Tracking how many calories you burn per exercise per hour can inspire you to exercise more than you would without this tracking ability. It can also encourage those who are prone to disliking exercise because they think it means running or doing aerobics. Reading an extensive calorie and exorcise chart may help you understand the benefits of other exercises like gardening, walking, making the bed or mowing the lawn. It may also prompt you to try something new like canoeing or horseback riding---both of which appear on some charts.

    Problems

    • The objective nature of calorie and exercise charts is just one problem. The other is that the calorie counts include the number of calories you would have burned had you done no exercise. That is, your body burns calories just to keep itself going: beating your heart, moving your blood, expanding and contracting your muscles. Let's say you naturally burn 100 calories per hour. A calorie and exercise chart may tell you that by walking briskly for 1 hour you burn 240 calories. Subtract the 100 calories you would have burned regardless and you're left with 140 calories burned because you walked briskly for an hour.

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