Buzz
Exercise offers a variety of benefits, and one key advantage is its ability to burn more calories than just sitting around. (Although, personally, I think the health and fitness benefits—like improving your strength, endurance, and heart health—are far more exciting, but that's a conversation for another time.) If you're focusing on weight management, it's essential to know which exercises burn the highest number of calories. Here's your guide to the top calorie-burning workouts.
Low-intensity exercise can outpace HIIT in calorie burning
It might seem counterintuitive. When you're pushing yourself hard, sweating and breathing heavily, it feels like you're doing something powerful, right? But after just a minute or two, you find yourself needing to pause and rest. During those moments, your calorie burn drops significantly.
This is why you should question anyone who claims to know how many calories you burn “per hour” of an activity you don’t actually do for an hour. For example, chopping wood with an ax, “quickly,” might burn 1,196 calories per hour for a 155-pound person. But who actually chops wood at top speed for an entire hour?
The same can be said for running at 10 mph. That’s the maximum speed on many treadmills. It’s a pace that nearly matches Olympic marathon qualifying times. Here’s how this compares to more reasonable paces that most people can maintain for an hour (calculated for a 155-pound person):
1,126 calories per hour if you run at a 6-minute-per-mile pace (10 miles per hour)
704 calories per hour at a more sustainable 10:00 pace (6 miles per hour)
563 calories per hour at a 12:00 pace (5 miles per hour)
For the average person, not a top-tier athlete, running at 10 mph for an hour just isn't realistic. But running at 5 mph for an hour? That’s totally doable. In fact, if you build your endurance, you could run hour-long, 5-mph jogs multiple times a week. And that’s what will have a far bigger impact on your calorie burn than a few intense bursts of HIIT, even if those bursts are at a 10-mph sprint.
Comparing the calorie burn of different activities
For simplicity, I’ll use a hypothetical 155-pound person here—not because that’s the ideal weight, but because it's a standard number that's commonly found on charts like this one. If you weigh more, you'll burn more, and if you weigh less, you'll burn fewer calories. These numbers allow us to compare different activities for the same person. You can calculate your own personal numbers here.
The following numbers are based on a “moderate” pace, something you could maintain for at least half an hour without much difficulty, unless stated otherwise. Here’s the breakdown:
Running, general (5 mph): 563 calories/hour
Cycling, moderate (12-14 mph): 563 calories/hour
Rowing machine, moderate: 507 calories/hour
Stationary cycling, moderate: 493 calories/hour
Aerobics class: 457 calories/hour
Walking uphill ( mph): 422 calories/hour
Lifting weights (“bodybuilding, vigorous”), 422 calories/hour
Hatha yoga: 281 calories/hour
Walking (3 mph): 232 calories/hour
Lifting weights (“light”), 211 calories/hour
If you’re looking to burn the most calories, running is your best option. Cycling follows closely behind, then comes rowing, with spin and aerobics classes rounding out the list (though this can vary from class to class).
Walking and lifting weights fall lower on the scale, but they’re still excellent exercises. (Keep in mind, though, that calorie burn isn’t the primary reason for lifting weights—I recommend not focusing on calories or heart rate while weightlifting.)
How to make any exercise burn more calories
Calorie burn isn’t an ineffable property of exercise that gets handed down to us from the Fitbit Gods. It’s just a measure of how much work your body is doing.
Importantly, the amount of work is not the same as how it feels. Remember the example of the all-out HIIT interval that feels awful but ultimately doesn’t mean we’re doing much work. There’s also a cool thing that happens as we get fitter: we can do more work in the same time, without it necessarily feeling harder.
Let’s say you’re doing an hour-long outing on your feet every Saturday morning. At first, you may just be walking, and you’ll burn 232 calories. But after a while you start jogging parts of it, and someday soon you’re jogging the whole thing. That’s 563 calories for the hour.
Time passes, and you get fitter. Your endurance improves, your heart pumps blood more efficiently, your legs even get stronger (especially if you’re doing some strength training on the days you aren’t jogging). When you’re able to do that hour-long run at an 8:00 pace, you’ll be burning 880 calories in that same hour. It might feel like exactly the same effort as when you first started, but you’re doing more work now—which is why it burns more calories.
There are two key ways to make any exercise burn more calories:
Extend the duration (for instance, go for a 45-minute bike ride instead of just 30 minutes)
Increase your fitness level so you can exert more effort while maintaining the same intensity (for example, cycling at 15 mph when you used to only manage 10 mph for the same amount of time).
However, keep in mind that calorie burn during exercise is just one piece of the puzzle. You can read more from me on how many calories we “should” burn in a day, and why you shouldn’t rely too heavily on the exact calorie burn figures your fitness tracker provides.
