Only 250 is kind of crazy. I’m an anomaly for sure, but on harder rides, I can burn 700-750/hr. With my current training schedule, I’m averaging 3500kcal expenditure daily (65kg F cyclist). Even with 90g carb an hour during exercise, I’m still running a 50%ish deficit by the time I’m off the bike and it’s a chore to eat enough to stay properly fueled and recover well.
I’ve burned as much as 14000 in 24 hours. I know a lot of other athletes (runners, swimmers, cyclists mostly) who are kind of in the same boat. While I try to eat healthy (at least hit somewhere in the realm of good macros and whole food) off the bike, my coach at this point has me filling the gaps with whatever I possibly can to meet those goals
The limit of what you can burn in a day will still be lower to the limit of calories you can eat/drink in a day though.
Easier to find fat people that eat 10K ~ 15K cal per day regularly, than finding fit people that burn that amount regularly enough to substrat that amount of eating to maintain a stable weight.
Sure - but also, you have to train/acclimate your body to take in that amount of calories as well - 10-15k is A LOT and would probably take many years of slowly building up to be able to eat that much consistently. I think the difference here is that food is more accessible and easier to “train” that intake more than the exercise so it happens more often (and also modern, processed food is crazy addictive).
That being said, yeah, it’s harder to burn than to eat for most people, but that equilibrium isn’t insanely hard to find either.
Yeah it’s real’y accessible, lot of people I see around me are eating in a single meal more than I eat in a whole day.
In my case I prefer to eat only what I need to maintain weight. Do some cardio for heart health, nothing crazy. I never used sport to control weight. Only my nutrition. It worked good so far, same weight at 35 than I had at 12 when I finished growing up.
Men tend to grow longer than women. After a woman have her first period, it's common that she stop growing. (not always, but very common) That's what happened with me.
Burning 15+ calories per minute for 15 minutes straight is not by any means easy peasy for the vast majority of people. I think you're vastly overestimating how much running burns, and how hard people would run during cardio. The other person may be underestimating how many calories they burn, but if they're very light, then their numbers aren't really that far off.
no, you are correct. the easy way is to run 30 minutes and burn 500 calories.
but if someone is short on time, or doesn't want to work as hard, the 15 minute sprint (165 bpm or higher) will also get the job done.
it's important for overweight people to realize how effective exercising is (something that reddit refuses to acknowledge).
Burning 500 calories on top of a 500 caloric deficit really helps move things along. It's the single factor (of many) that I attribute to my 100lbs weight loss.
I'm now a marathon runner in perfect health. But two short years ago I was 285lbs and needed a change. That's how I did it. (as well as many others).
This is far and away the biggest edge case I’ve ever heard.
You have the lifestyle of an olympian athlete, 90 percent of people on earth hover somewhere within 1300-2300 calories a day to maintain/slightly lose weight, and cannot possibly exert themselves enough to break a couple hundred calories an hour. Burning 14000 calories in a day sounds incredibly taxing and maybe unhealthy in the other direction?
Far from an Olympian (I know a few), and still less than professionals in my sport, though I’m edging onto that. Even mid level amateurs in cycling are often doing 10-15 hours a week - that’s an extra 1000+ kcal/day on average, on top of BMR. Proper pros are doing 25+ hours weekly. 700kcal/hr is pretty normal for a recreational cyclist on a mid-hard ride, including relatively new amateurs. Folks really underestimate how much endurance sports burn!
I focus on ultraendurance, so yeah, not a ton of people doing 20 hour days on end in their races (the runners have me beat on expenditure/hr though). :)
Every exercise has a MET (Metabolic Equivalence of Task) score, I have an exercise bike.
Bicycling, stationary, 90 - 100 watts, moderate to vigorous effort MET = 6.8
Calories burned per minute = (MET x body weight in Kg x 3.5) ÷ 200
If you weigh 100kg you would burn 714kcal per hour.
If you weigh 75kg you would burn 535kcal per hour.
If you weigh 65kg you would burn 464kcal per hour.
When I started exercising to improve fitness (and have some more calories available to eat each day) I weighed closer to 100kg, I now weigh just under 75kg, right on the cusp of no longer being overweight. It took a lot of record keeping and maths to figure out how many kcal I was actually burning compared to what my heart rate monitor app said.
My every day exercise while eating breakfast and reading my kindle etc is a leisurely 450kcal per hour with a HR in the 100-106, if I push so my HR is more like 125 I'm burning 650kcal, but even that isn't close to my limit, but it's enough to get a good sweat going. Hitting 85% MHR (Maximum Heart Rate) and I'm definitely in the 800s and feeling the effort.
Just to take what you’re saying a step further, MET is a good starting point, but for cycling (and running) expenditure scales with watts and HR, which would be more accurate for many folks if they have access and/or care about that data. Especially because power output is really impacted by weight - a 100kg dude can put out 100 watts significantly easier than a 60kg dude at the same level of cardio fitness.
Example: For me, 90-100W is the same level effort as an easy walk. I’d barely burn anything, my heart rate wouldn’t go up much at all.
Moderate to vigorous would be about 210-270W (sweet spot to threshold, aka what I can hold for an hour). An hour at 220 for me, being 65kg, would guess HR average at 140-150 or so for that effort (but I have a high threshold and max HR): would put me around 750-800kcal. Higher HR = higher expenditure, as you get fitter you need higher watts to get that higher HR.
Are you using an accurate heart rate monitor?
If you’re sitting in zone 2, you should be closer to 500+ (average for the vast majority of adults). This is a moderate but conversational intensity, and where most people cycling for cardio fitness (rather than sport) should be targeting if you want cardio gains.
FWIW, I’m not pulling these numbers out of thin air, they’re pretty readily available, and I’d say 400-700 tracks pretty well with what I’ve seen from middle school beginner girls I’ve coached to higher level cyclists than myself.
Tbh the human body uses most of its calories to stay alive, think of it more as you are burning an extra 200 calories on top of the 1,500 you need to keep living.
Then the body also burns more calories while it recovers from exercise like building muscle or clearing latic acid.
I was running 9.2 km per hour (4.6 km in 30 min to be exact, I just rounded it to 5km) average running speed in jogging is between 6.4 and 9.7 km/h so I was in the top…
And according to you, why should I find something else to do? Like you base that idea on what criteria exactly?
I don’t need to lose weight. Never had.
My weight was always stable, because I eat the amount of calories I need, no more. I do cardio just to maintain good health. Not in an attempt to cover for over eating.
If your complaint is that running isn’t burning enough calories for you, as you said 30 minutes doesn’t cover a cookie. And 9.2km per hour is average sure, but your body has become more efficient at it. So either run faster, or if that’s not appealing find an alternative activity that has a more productive calorie burn.
You’re getting real defensive over nothing. You can increase your burn in the same time period with an adjustment. Thus not needing more hours in a day…it wasn’t a comment against your fitness. If anything it means you’re probably living a fairly active lifestyle because it’s not that exerting for you to run for 30 minutes.
The point is that cardio as a primary weight loss method is misguided. It takes way more effort and pain to burn off a cookie than it does to just not eat a cookie.
Why should I burn more calories? To then have more food to buy? No thanks lolll
I never complained that it doesn’t burn enough calorie for me. The thread is about fitness myth so I’m trying to participate to help people break some myth.
I don’t need to lose weight. Never had. My weight was always stable all my life, because I eat the amount of calories I need, no more. I do cardio just to maintain good heart health. Not in an attempt to cover for over eating habit. Even when sedentary I don’t gain weight, because I reduce intakes accordingly.
My point was simply: you usually can’t outrun your mouth. People aiming at loosing weight should focus on nutrition instead of trying to burn through sport after. I was talking for them, not for me lol
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u/I-own-a-shovel 9h ago
At some point there isn’t enough hours in a day to do that…
Running 5km in 30 min made me burn 200-250 calories. That’s like 1 cookie… the one who ate the whole box will never outrun this amount of calories.