Treadmill Desk

Counting the Calories Burned on Your Treadmill

If your treadmill doesn’t have one of those fancy calorie counting consoles, how can you know exactly how many calories you’ve actually burned? Well, there are some calorie counting calculations which you can do, but if you can’t find your calculator or can’t be bothered with working out the math, here are a few “ballpark” figures for you, just to give you some idea.

• Walking Briskly on the Flat – if you go for a routine walk on your treadmill, averaging around 3 – 4 mph (a good way to start your treadmill adventure if you’re a bit of an “exercise virgin”) then a person of around 160 pounds can expect to burn up 145 calories in thirty minutes. Now, if you equate that to eating a tasty chocolate muffin for breakfast (around 600 calories) you should just about have got rid of it in a couple of hours in time for a mid morning snack.
• Walking Briskly on an Incline – if you incline your treadmill to around 12 or even 15 per cent, this can make a big difference to the amount of calories burned. The steeper the incline the more calories you will use to climb up it, so, if our 160 pound person walked briskly for 30 minutes up a 10% incline, the calories used up would rise to around 345.  You could have another muffin after only one hour.
• Jogging – as you get gradually fitter, (more walking and less muffins) you might like to up your speed to a nice steady jog of around 6 mph. This way, our person of 160 pounds (you’d have thought he’d have lost a bit of weight by now wouldn’t you?) will use up around 367 calories in 30 minutes.