I’ve been boxing for a few months now (as a hobby) and I remember for the first couple of months, after a workout I would be completely wiped out, seeing stars and ready collapse. Now I would able to do the same routine and be pretty ok afterwards, albeit still drenched in sweat. This got me wondering, even though I’m doing the same 3 rounds of jump-roping, shadow boxing etc, but with greater ease, am I burning the same amount of calories? Or has my body gotten so used to those motions that it takes considerably less calories to perform the same movements?
I’m sure I’ve probably developed a certain degree of efficiency in throwing punches and all that, but is it enough to really lessen the amount of calories I burn? Would I have to still work out until I can barely walk to burn the same calories as in the beginning?
So my question basically is how well does our perceived exertion correlate to calorie loss?
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If an average Joe and a professional athlete performed the same exercise (one that neither are familiar with), would they burn more or less the same amount of calories?
People used to low levels of exertion will burn more calories doing the same activity than someone with a consistently higher level of exertion, yes.
Don’t confuse that with fat and skinny, either. An out-of-shape skinny person with a low resting metabolic rate will burn more calories jogging 1 mile for the first time than a fat person with a high resting metabolic rate who jogs a mile every day.
People with more body weight do have to work harder to move it, though. Say you have two people who both jog a mile every day, but one of them weighs 110 pounds and the other 210. The 210 pound person will necessarily burn more calories jogging their mile than the 110 pound person.
I am not a nutritionist.
I don’t know the exact answer to your question, but “how tired you are afterwards” isn’t necessarily a very good way of judging how many calories you’ve burned. If I did a brutal 2 minute exercise - high-speed burpees with a weight vest on, or whatever - I’d feel more exhausted than after a casual 20 minute jog, but the jog would burn more calories. I imagine the whole process is actually very complicated, and the basic weight-loss ideas of “count the calories in your food, count the calories you burn exercising” is just a useful way for the average person to think about it, rather than being particularly accurate.
Your middle two paragraphs contradict each other. Your third paragraph is correct, not the second. Moreover, your second paragraph contains an intrinsic contradiction. A low resting metabolic rate means less calories expended than a high resting metabolic rate.
I know we’re all supposed to use 3500 calories to burn a pound of fat and so forth. And running a mile supposed to burn so many calories per pound of body weight. But these rules don’t seem to work well. Some people can eat almost nothing and still gain weight. Others, myself included, can eat enormous quantities of calories and not gain weight. I mentioned in another post that I discovered chocolate milk to be a “trigger food” that did add weight beyond the calorie count. Against another rule, exercise does not seem to produce a weight loss for me. If I have to take exercise time off, my weight goes down! I violate so many stereotype rules that I make my own rules now. I think we all need to keep good records of intake and exercise and experiment to see what works for us.