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Do you want to burn 500 calories or even a 1000 and you have limited exercise time, moreover, you don’t know which sport or exercise that you should do to burn those calories?
Do you want several suggestions of sports or exercises to help you burn the calories you want in your specified spare time?
You are not alone and Chaparral Compounding Pharmacy – Remedy’sRx would like to help you!
Normally, when you want to lost weight (hopefully all from fat!) you must reduce calories or burn them or a mixture of both.
Three possible ways are available to do that:
- Either to reduce the amount of calories you take from food
- Or to increase the amount of daily activity (i.e. be more active by doing any type of exercises depending on your schedule and the amount of calories you want to lose)
- Or mix of reducing calorific intake and be more active!
Normally, you should determine your calories’ needs using this free online calories calculator to determine your calories if you want to lose, maintain, or gain weight. Then you should pick the amount of calories that will make you lose weight, or pick your maintenance level and decrease it by 300 to 500 calories. It is advised to begin with reducing your calories intake by 300 to 500 calories (you can reduce more or less calories but this range is to just avoid slow results or going to starvation mode.)
Let’s say that you don’t want to decrease the amount of food you eat, then you have to lose all the, for example, 300 calories by doing exercise.
But which exercise should I choose?
There are lots and lots of exercises that can burn lots of calories, but each one is different. Every age, weight, gender (and their combinations) can burn calories differently doing the same exercise! The duration time of exercise practice is also extremely important and proportionately affect the amount of calories burnt.
Our free online exercise suggestions calculator is different from other available online exercise or sports calculators. Other calculators work in a non-efficient way. They will ask you to select and input gender, age, weight, exercise type, expected duration of the exercise, then it will give you how much calories could be burned by that information.
So, in those other calculators, you have to enter your information and vary the sports or exercises then vary the duration or time that you dedicated to exercise in order to get the amount of calories that you can burn.
This is the opposite of what most people need.
What people need is a calculator that gives them what types of sports or exercises they can do to burn their specific amount of calories based on their physical information that includes age, gender, age, and the duration you want to spend practicing or exercising.
What is our calculator based on?
Our calculator is based on a famous concept of metabolic equivalent of task or MET. MET is scientifically defined as the amount of oxygen consumed by the human body while at rest. And since the energy expenditure is related to the oxygen consumption, so another definition of MET is the amount of energy the body consume during a specific activity compared to the energy consumed by the same body when it is at rest (sitting).
So if the MET value of a specific exercise is 5.5. That means that you will consume oxygen or burn calories 5.5 times what you will do while sitting doing nothing.
What MET values are considered light, moderate, and strenuous or vigorous?
Generally speaking, it is agreed that:
- values less than 3 MET are considered light activities;
- values between 3 and 6 are considered moderate activities;
- values over 6 are considered vigorous activities.
Does the free online exercise suggestions calculator take age into consideration?
Although there is no specific equation or parameter that can take age into consideration when doing exercises, our calculator generally will suggest exercises with lower MET (i.e. less vigorous) as the user is old or very young or not a male or female.
Disclaimer: You should consult your doctor before conducting any type of exercise or diet change. Our calculator is just an estimator based on available knowledge to recommend exercises.
How can you use the above free online exercise suggestions calculator to get recommendation of several exercises based on your own physical information and calorific needs?
The design of the calculator is user friendly. But we will give two examples to illustrate how to use it.
Example 1:
A female, 35 years old, 90 kg, who wants to burn 200 calories, and only have 20 minutes per day to do exercise.
Our calculator will suggest the following exercises:
Note that although the calculator didn’t gave the sport/activity with the exact calories wanted (200 calories), since the time allowed was not sufficient, the calculator suggested sports with the closest amount of calories burned (180 and less). But if that female user increased the time allowed, the calculator would be able to suggest more exercises or inform the user that dancing for example would be able to burn more calories if you increased the time.
That can remove lots of guess work!
Example 2:
Second example is for a male, 70 years old, 60 kg, who wants to burn 300 calories, and can do 30 minutes per day to exercise (that user must check with his physician before doing any exercise or activities to make sure that his health would not be impacted).
Our calculator will suggest the following exercises:
Please note that our calculator restricted the activity MET to be 3 or less to account for the user’s age. In that case, if that male senior user wants to burn the 300 calories it is better for him to increase the exercise time not the intensity of the exercise itself. Again, all senior users must consult their physician to determine the appropriate activity level and time.
Is this the final version of the calculator?
No. Chaparral Compounding Pharmacy – Remedy’sRx will keep improving the calculator based on more activities from the 2011 Compendium of Physical Activities which has an exhaustive list of sports and activities and their equivalent METS.
We will also try to include more factors to be considered in our calculations.