Everyone needs at least 30 minutes a day of exercise at a minimum, and the American Heart Association recommends that you spend 150 minutes (or 2.5 hours) a week doing moderate exercise to maintain your body weight and health. Other recommendations rely on how much calories you should burn a day to maintain or lose weight. The following exercises list the health benefits the exercise will have on your body and how many calories you will burn during one hour of the exercise.
Low-Impact Aerobics
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Stretching is one of the best things you can do for your body. The main benefit is improving your flexibility, but it also improves the range of movement in your joints, increases circulation to your body, helps you relax, and enhances your muscle coordination. You can burn 90 calories alone in one hour of stretching, including passive (hold and release), dynamic (hold an increase range), and ballistic (bounce motion) stretches.
Pilates is a set of low-impact exercises and stretches the helps condition your body and strengthen your core muscles. It also improves your flexibility and balance. Pilates often uses specialized equipment to achieve a better workout, such as the Pilates ball and exercise bands. A moderate Pilates workout will burn about 200-300 calories in an hour.
Yoga is a type of exercise that involves stretching positions and meditation. Yoga improves your flexibility, muscle strength, and posture. It also helps your joints, back, and blood flow. Yoga also helps you relax mentally and relieve stress. In one hour, you could burn 200-400 calories in a moderate to intense yoga routine.
Walking is the most popular type of low-impact aerobics. Walking improves circulation, aids in weight loss, increases oxygen intake, and improves your energy level and mood. It is the easiest exercise plan you can go on. Walking at an easy to moderate pace can burn up to 390 calories per hour (which is approximately 3.5 miles).
High Impact Aerobics
Running is a high impact aerobic activity that has numerous benefits, such as lower cholesterol and blood pressure, weight loss, improved lung strength, and lowering stress. Running is also known to keep your brain sharper, improve your mood, reduce changes of getting cancer, and even add years to your life. Running at a steady speed of 5 to 8 miles an hour (for an hour) can burn approximately 750 to 1080 calories.
Biking or cycling is an intense workout for you entire body, not just your legs. While it improves your leg strength and balance, it has so many more benefits. It actually helps prevent diseases such as arthritis, stroke, heart attack, depression, diabetes, obesity, and arthritis. Biking for an hour a day, even at a leisurely pace, can burn about 360 calories.
Jumping rope is an easy, fun, and highly effective exercise that burns tons of calories in a short time. Jumping rope increases your heart rate which effectively burns fat and decreases the risk of heart disease. It also increases your coordination, strengthens your ankle joints, and even increases your brain power and ability to handle stress. Jumping rope for an hour will burn about 400 calories.
Elliptical and treadmill routines are also effective for improving your health. They provide the same benefits as the other aerobic exercises but you can control the speed, intensity, and resistance level of the workout. In fact, you can customize a cardiovascular workout that targets your fitness level and goals. Calories burned at a moderate pace on the elliptical machine for 30 minutes followed by 30 minutes of brisk walking on the treadmill will burn about 350 calories. Increase the pace and incline on the treadmill and you will burn even more calories.
Swimming uses every major muscle in your body and is therefore a great exercise that burns fat, tones muscles, and works your heart and lungs without the risk of injuring your joints or back. This is why swimming is also popular for elderly and those who have back, knee, and hip problems. It exercises your joints and muscles without jarring them. A whopping 530 calories can be burned for an hour of light to moderate swimming.
High Intensity Interval Training (or HIIT) is a modern exercise technique that involves a short intense period of activity/exercise followed by a period of low activity or rest. HIIT is known to increase your metabolism and burn fat quickly, and if you add core strength training into the intense HIIT workout, you will be rounding off a workout routine for both muscular fitness and cardiovascular health. An HIIT workout using a treadmill for one hour of altering HIIT running/incline and then slow walking can burn 275 calories. Other exercises, including weight training and aerobic workouts, can also be used for the HIIT routine.
Strength Training
Core strength training allows you to tone your muscles and develop better balance and control of your body, which prevents falls and decreases proneness to injuries. In this regard, a core strength workout is essential for athletes and others who have vigorous daily work. One main benefit is improved posture which prevents back/spinal degenerative diseases. Core strength exercises include floor exercises that use the weight of your body and gravity to apply resistance to core muscle groups (back, hips, abdomen, and chest). While core strength training may be intense and leave you sore after a workout, you will not burn as many calories as aerobic exercises. However, you can burn about 45 calories per 10-minute routine, which could add up to more than 270 calories in an hour of continuous exercise.
Weight training uses body’s resistance, weights, or exercise bands to strengthen and tone muscles. This type of exercise builds core strength and motor coordination along with muscle tissue. In addition, weight training builds up your bone density while decreasing your body fat percentage. And don’t forget, lean muscles means a lean heart. You can expect to burn about 265 calories on a full upper and lower body weight lifting routine.
Sports of any kind make good exercise, and if you have a passion for it, an hour of sports workout won’t seem like a workout at all. Not only will you be adding cardio benefits and physical fitness, you will also develop coordination, increase performance, and improve your mood and your mental capacity to cope. Take a look at the following sports activities and how many calories they burn in one hour (which are high numbers, surprisingly).
- Skiing – 391 cal/hr
- Hiking – 546 cal/hr
- Soccer – 610 cal/hr
- Rollerblading – 683 cal/hour
- Tennis – 728 cal/hr
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