It is quite natural for every person to care about their health and physique, and therefore their looks. Each of us wants to look a certain way, to find the right weight that works best with our height and lifestyle. In order for that to be a reality, there needs to be a balance between eating right and being physically active.
A healthy and balanced diet cannot work without proper exercise, and vice versa. If one is to shed weight or gain weight, burn fat, or gain muscle mass, the calorie intake, and loss need to be right. In this article, we talk about calorie burn, especially when using one of the most popular cardio exercises, the rowing machine.
Contents
What Are Calories?
Everyone has heard of calories, but do you know what they are exactly? Calories are a measure of the energy content of food and beverages, a universal unit to see how much of it you are taking in. When we eat or drink, the body breaks down the food into its components like carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, converting these nutrients into energy to fuel processes like breathing, moving, and thinking.
A calorie is a unit of measurement used to quantify the amount of energy a food or beverage contains. One calorie is the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius. When talking about food calorie content, we usually refer to kilocalories (kcal) equal to 1,000 calories.
Every single item that is considered a food or a beverage has its calorie total, which depends on its macronutrient content. Carbohydrates and proteins contain 4 calories per gram, while fats contain 9. While it is not a nutrient, alcohol, has 7 calories per gram.
Consuming more calories than our body needs, or that our diet plan dictates, there is an excess of energy stored as fat. This is what causes involuntary weight gain. On the other hand, consuming fewer calories than needed uses up all the fat and leads to weight loss. Because of this, understanding the calorie content of what we eat and drink is a very important part of managing weight, fitness, and health.
Burning Calories Through Workouts
High-intensity workouts like interval training or HIIT (High-Intensity Interval Training) are extremely effective in burning calories. These workouts consist of short bursts of intense activity and brief periods of rest. A variety of exercises can be included in such a session including running, cycling, and bodyweight exercises.
Building muscle through strength training can also help you burn more calories. What is great about this is that it allows calorie burning even when you are not actually working out. Muscle tissue is more metabolically active than fat tissue, so resting burns calories on its own. Strength training has to be a part of your workout routine to build muscle and boost your metabolism anyway, so the shedding of calories is a great bonus.
To prevent the body from getting too comfortable and too used to one or a few types of workouts, as well as to challenge yourself in different ways, mix up your workouts and try different activities and exercises. Prevent boredom with such an approach too!
Although structured workouts are important, increasing your overall level of activity per day helps as well. Taking the stairs instead of the elevator, walking instead of driving for short trips, and incorporating more movement altogether are all beneficial.
Last but not least, you must pay attention to what you are eating. There is no sense in working out and suffering to burn calories only to make it all up with unhealthy food. While exercise is important for burning calories and the only way to do so actively, it is also important to pay attention to the diet. A balanced diet with a moderate calorie deficit helps you lose weight and burn more overall.
Cardio Exercise: How Many Do They Burn?
Now we are getting to the good bit, the types of exercise that burn the most calories and that are arguably the healthiest for the entire body. Cardio exercises are very good for the heart, lungs, blood vessels, and stamina. They use multiple muscle groups at once and promote breathing. The number of calories burned during cardio varies depending on age, weight, sex, intensity, and duration of the workout. However, certain estimates exist and here we will do them for an average 150-pound person:
Running at a moderate pace, which is around 6 mph, burns approximately 340 calories per 30 minutes. However, running at a slightly faster pace of 8 mph burns about 460 calories in half an hour.
A moderate cycling pace of between 12 and 14 mph burns an average of 240 calories per 30 minutes while picking it up a notch and being more vigorous between 16 and 20 mph will burn 410 calories in 30 minutes
When it comes to swimming, approximately 270 calories per 30 minutes are burned by doing it moderately. If you swim more vigorously, you can get rid of as many as 400 calories in the same window.
Jumping rope is a popular cardio exercise and it burns approximately 290 calories in 30 minutes. HIIT workouts that we mentioned above are quite heavy-hitting. They can burn between 300 and 500 calories in half an hour, depending on the workout combo and intensity level.
How Much Does The Rowing Machine Burn?
A rowing machine is a great piece of gym equipment that works the back, arms, legs, core, and abs at the same time. It allows the user to mimic the recognizable rowing movement. The number of calories burned on a rowing machine depends greatly on the usual factors like age, weight, and sex, but also on the intensity and duration of the workout. To stick with the same premise from earlier, on average, a 150-pound person burns between 210 and 300 calories in 30 minutes of moderate-intensity rowing.
Increasing the intensity of your workout and rowing faster or with more resistance will allow you to burn a lot more, reaching 400+ per 30 minutes easily. High-intensity interval training (HIIT) workouts can also be done on the rowing machine, or with it, at which point you can burn more calories in a shorter amount of time.
The rowing machine is definitely a great way to burn calories, but also an effective full-body workout that can improve cardiovascular fitness, muscular endurance, and strength. What is more, it is a low-intensity exercise that protects the joints, unlike many other cardio exercises. Incorporating rowing into your fitness regime provides many benefits beyond just burning calories and it should definitely be your fitness goal.
