For my exercise routine I jog/walk up and down the stairs in my apartment building and I’d like to calculate how many calories I’m burning.
I would like to be able to enter all of this info:
Male, 35, 185cm, 102kg
I start on the 6th floor and run down to the ground floor and then up to the 10th floor. I always finish my run on the 6th floor. I reach the 10th floor a total of 13 times.
My altimeter watch gives an average total ascent of 259 metres. My average overall time is 40 minutes.
Thanks to anyone who knows of an online calculator that can use all of this info.
Estimating calories expended is tough because there’s a lot of individual variation. Pick one you like and use it to calculate everything–even if it’s not accurate, it’ll be consistent.
I think the only thing that would do that somewhat accurately is one of the fancier heart rate monitors that does calorie calculation at the time you do the workout, and takes your weight into account. By going up and down the stairs, you’re after a pretty specific calculator, I cant think of any that would really qualify.
Don’t know of an online calculator for this but one probably exists. I wouldn’t trust any online calculators, they are all approximations because one person can be more efficient at stair climbing than another one because of technique and body types. Take anything you see with a grain of salt.
Why not just use some basic physics calculations?
E = f *mgh / 1000
where:
E = energy expended in Calories
f = fudge factor (mmmmm, fudge!)
m = mass in kilograms
g = 9.81
h = height in metres
Let’s assume a fudge factor of 1.3 for you due to inefficiency. This calculation will give an energy expenditure for going up. You can use a small fraction (like 20%) of the uphill value for your downhill value as an approximation for downhill energy expenditure. With your stats, after going uphill for 259 metres, you have expended:
There you go, you used about 420 Calories (which is about how many Calories there are in one donut). This number is in addition to your basal metabolic rate, which is the amount of energy your body burns to stay alive if you did nothing, but you don’t normally include that in energy expenditure for exercising.
From my background in bicycle racing, this number appears reasonable.
Is there anything the OP can do with his/her body temperature before and after the workout? For example, if the OP’s body temp is 98.6[sup]o[/sup] F at the beginning but goes up by 1[sup]o[/sup] F during the workout, all of that heat is going to eventually be lost – there’s no way for the body to recover it as useful energy*. So if we assume the OP’s body has a certain heat capacity and known mass, then we can calculate how much energy is lost as heat.
The average human body has a specific heat capacity of ~3500 Joules per kilogram per Kelvin (cite). At the beginning of the workout your body temperature should be nearly 310.15K and over the course of the workout it will increase to T[sub]final[/sub]. Given a mass of 102kg, we can estimate that you’ll burn 85 kcal** for every 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (or each degree K or C) you can raise your body temperature during your workout. To make it easier on you, each degree F raise in temperature is caused by (at least) 45 kcal of energy turning into heat. You can ensure that this heat gets lost by taking a cooldown walk or stretch after you work out, or taking a cool shower.
To be clear, the energy lost to heat is part of the inefficiency that goes into Chasing Dreams’ fudge factor – I’m just trying to refine his equation a little bit. A more accurate estimate would also include the outdoor temperature and the amount of additional heat that your body is radiating and/or convecting away via sweat.
…that I’m aware of.
** Note that the common nutrition term “calorie” is the engineering “kilocalorie” when converting from Joules.
These numbers are in Joules, unless I missed the conversion step… which means the workout only burns about 84 calories. That seems unreasonable to me. I’m guessing that a better calculation would take into account how fast the OP is moving up the stairs, and determine the energy required to accelerate the OP to that average velocity and keep him at that speed in the presence of gravity’s pull.
The equation I gave using the units I specified gives the energy used in kilojoules, also known as Calories with a capital C. The “/ 1000” takes care of the unit conversion. So the units are correct. The OP burnt about 420 Calories according to the calculations.
That calculator in the link isn’t very accurate. All it takes is the weight of the person and the amount of time spent in the activity. The OP could just have climbed 10 stairs in 40 minutes and that calculator would still say he burned 610 calories.
I would give more trust to the equation I specified because it takes an estimate of how much work you do against gravity.