Geschatte leestijd: 4 minutenYou primarily burn calories with cardio training. However, there are so many different forms of cardio training. Which form of cardio training leads to the highest number of calories burned? You’ll find out here!
What Determines Calorie Burning in Cardio Training?
Every person is unique, and so is the calorie burning per person. Factors such as age, gender, height, and weight play an important role in calorie burning during cardio training. You have control over your weight, but not over the other factors.
Nutrition is Leading
If you want to lose weight, nutrition is of course the most important variable. After all, it’s much easier to eliminate 200 calories through a well-developed nutrition plan or diet than it is to burn 200 calories with cardio training.
Various Forms of Cardio Training
We can distinguish 3 types of cardio, namely: low intensity, moderate intensity, and high intensity cardio. Low intensity includes activities like leisurely walking or cycling, while high intensity can involve Tabatas.
Cardio training usually refers to moderate intensity training.
Jumping Rope
It’s not the first form of cardio that comes to mind, but jumping rope burns the most calories. This is because jumping rope is a form of HIIT, or High Intensity Interval Training.
This means that you engage in intense exercise for a relatively short period and then rest little. When you do this in multiple reps, it leads to high calorie burning, requiring less time to exercise to burn a high number of calories.
Just to give you an idea: 15 minutes of jumping rope is equivalent to 1 hour of leisurely walking or 30 minutes on the stationary bike.
In addition, jumping rope also engages other muscles such as your legs, calves, buttocks, as well as your abdominal and lower back muscles.
Running
One of the easiest sports to start with and to burn calories is running. After all, you put on your running shoes and start running. You can also easily do this in the gym or at home on the treadmill.
Running has become very popular again lately. During the corona crisis, gyms were closed, and running became a popular choice to stay active.
You can burn a lot of calories while running. How many calories you burn depends on how fast you run and how long you run. Additionally, your own body weight also plays a role.
There are various tables that provide an estimate of how many calories you burn while running. Note: this is an indication. Factors like baseline fitness and gender also play a big role in calorie burning during running and are not taken into account in this table.
| Weight → Duration↓ | 60 kg | 70 kg | 80 kg | 100 kg | 120 kg | 150 kg |
| 15 minutes | 155 kcal | 182 kcal | 208 kcal | 260 kcal | 312 kcal | 390 kcal |
| 30 minutes | 312 kcal | 364 kcal | 416 kcal | 520 kcal | 626 kcal | 779 kcal |
| 45 minutes | 468 kcal | 550 kcal | 625 kcal | 780 kcal | 930 kcal | 1,160 kcal |
| 60 minutes | 624 kcal | 725 kcal | 830 kcal | 1,030 kcal | 1,245 kcal | 1,550 kcal |
| 90 minutes | 930 kcal | 1,092 kcal | 1,248 kcal | 1,558 kcal | 1,870 kcal | 2,339 kcal |
| 120 minutes | 1,248 kcal | 1,457 kcal | 1,664 kcal | 2,079 kcal | 2,495 kcal | 3,119 kcal |
Spinning
Cycling is another good way to burn a lot of calories. But I’m not talking about just cycling around your neighborhood; I mean spinning. Spinning is an intensive way of cycling in a group, often done indoors at the gym. Another word for spinning is indoor cycling, or also known as RPM by Les Mills.
Spinning classes take place in a large room with many bikes and one bike for the instructor. The room is often dark and illuminated by LED lighting. During the class, the instructor tells you what to do and how hard to set the intensity of your bike. This all happens to upbeat beats and music.
You adjust the intensity of your bike using the knob on your bike. This is a small button that allows you to make cycling harder or lighter.
During a spinning class, you burn quite a few calories. Someone weighing around 70kg can easily burn 300 kcal during an indoor cycling class.
Rowing
Okay, maybe you don’t immediately think of rowing when you think of losing weight, but this is also a perfect cardio exercise where you can burn a lot of calories. It often looks boring and easy to do, but did you know that you train almost all muscles while rowing? That is therefore one of the main reasons why you can burn so many kcal with it.
When you use all muscles during an exercise, this obviously means that these muscles need energy to perform these exercises. So, think about it, during the rowing exercise, which muscles all have to be put into operation to perform the exercise. Then you’ll find out that these are often more muscles than, for example, with spinning or running.
In addition, the strain on your body is much less than with running. It’s an exercise that you can perform quite smoothly and has little impact on your joints and knees, as you do with running.
Just like with running, there are various factors that play a role in the number of calories you burn while rowing. That’s why we also have a table for you here.
| Weight → Duration↓ | 60 KG | 70 KG | 80 KG | 100 KG | 120 KG |
| 15 min | 120 kcal | 139 kcal | 159 kcal | 197 kcal | 237 kcal |
| 30 min | 235 kcal | 275 kcal | 318 kcal | 395 kcal | 470 kcal |
| 45 min | 355 kcal | 415 kcal | 470 kcal | 590 kcal | 715 kcal |
| 60 min | 470 kcal | 555 kcal | 640 kcal | 801 kcal | 949 kcal |
| 90 min | 710 kcal | 830 kcal | 949 kcal | 1,190 kcal | 1,425 kcal |
