If you want a vigorous high-calorie burning exercise, you would like to use a treadmill. To maximize health benefits, adults should spend from 150 to 300 minutes a week on moderate to intensity cardiovascular workout.
In other words, you can walk or run on a treadmill to gain a healthy life. However, it is tricky to know how many calories you need to burn on the treadmill.
Factors Determine The Calories You Burned on A Treadmill
The amount of calories you burn per kilometer or mile is determined by:
Stride length
For people having short strides, they will have to pick up and put down their feet more frequently. As a result, this will make them burn more calories.
Weight
You have to spend calories as you move your body while doing an activity. Therefore, the more heavy you are, the more calories you will burn per kilometer or mile on a treadmill.
Exercise intensity
Intensive workouts make your cardiovascular organs and lungs work harder. Consequently, you will end up using a lot of calories. To know how intensive your workout is, check your heart rate or pulse while running.
Speed
Running at a high speed for a short time continuously allows you to burn a large amount of calories.
Incline
Hiking and running uphill burn additional calories.
Motorized treadmills
The smooth surface and moving belt let you burn less calories than a non-treadmill walking or running does.
Holding the handrails
If you lay your hands on the handrails, you will definitely burn fewer calories.
Read more: How Many Calories Burned To Effectively Lose Weight?
Treadmill Calorie Displays
It’s hard to find a treadmill with no calorie display today. To precisely show the burned calories, a treadmill is likely to ask for your body mass and height. Therefore, make sure to input the correct information.
If a treadmill just asks for your weight or nothing at all, it merely estimates the burned calories based on the distance, speed, and incline. Most of the treadmills don’t count your stride length and exercise intensity as estimating factors.
However, a pulse monitor on-board may help a treadmill evaluate the burned calories based on the intensity of an exercise. In order to do this, simply lay your hand on the indicator, and it will measure your heart rate to determine how hard your workout is. Hence, a treadmill will display most accurately the calories you burned when it has the information of your speed, heart rate, body mass, and height.
Treadmills do not show 100% correct amount of calories burned
Truth be told, there is no fixed answer for your calories burned while doing an activity because there are many variables. Therefore, even if you run on the most high-end treadmill with a lot of reliable sensors, the displayed number of the calories burned is just a rough estimation.
However, with such values, you can do a lot such as gain weight or lose weight effectively. By knowing how much calories you spend on doing activities and maintaining body mass, you can consume less calories to lose weight and vice versa.
How to Burn Calories Effectively When Using A Treadmill
2 common rules of running and losing weight
- The calories you will burn when running is proportional to your weight. For example, a 140-pound man who runs in 30 minutes at the speed of 6 mph will end up burning 318 calories. On the other hand, a 180-pound person will burn 408 calories with the same amount of time and speed.
- You will burn more if you run faster. Let’s take another example. A 160-pound person who runs in 30 minutes at the speed of 5 mph will burn 290 calories. However, if that person increase his or her speed to 6 mph, he or she will have 363 calories burned.
Having a weight loss goal
Did you know that if you want to lose one pound, you need to burn 3,500 calories a week? Therefore, if losing 1 pound each week is your desire, try to set a 3,500 calories burned goal by eating less or working out more. It is better to choose the latter option as doing exercise not only helps you lose weight, but also gives you a perfect body.
Besides, you can combine the two methods if you want. By doing so, you can slowly reduce your weight while you don’t have to run a lot or reduce a large amount of foods. However, for your safety, you should only expect to lose a half pound to two pounds a week. This is because if you lose weight faster than that, you will have a high chance of losing muscle and fat, which may do considerable harm to your health.
Follow your goal
In order to complete your goal of losing one pound a week, you may need to lose 500-calorie deficit a day. You can try using online tools to determine how much calories loss is the best for you. However, you can estimate the number yourself by following the example below:
A 150-pound person have to run at the speed of 6 mph in 45 minutes a day to lose a pound per week. To be specific, he or she will have to run 4.5 miles a day or, in other words, 30.5 miles per week.
Can You Only Run 20 Minutes on The Treadmill A Day?
Leading a busy life may restrict you from having a full workout session. Therefore, you may wonder whether exercising for a short time is effective or not.
Fortunately, running on a treadmill can totally help you burn a significant amount of calories by providing you with a lot of exercise modes such as running, walking, hinking, etc.
Running
If you think running is all about losing weight, you may reconsider. As a matter of fact, all the major muscles of the body will join in a run in 20 minutes on a treadmill.
As a positive result, your cardiovascular endurance will be improved and you can burn a quite satisfying amount of calories. To be specific, running at the speed of 6 mph for 20 minutes will help you burn 229 calories; however, running at the speed of 8 mph just give you 299 calories loss.
Walking
As stated above, increasing your speed leads to burning more calories. Therefore, when walking on a treadmill, you should increase your speed to burn more calories.
However, avoid holding onto the handrails because this decreases the calories your body spends. Try to swing your arms briskly instead. Also, walking continuously on a treadmill at the speed of 3 mph in 20 minutes helps to burn 73 calories.
Incline
Try setting the treadmill at an higher incline to burn burn more calories than just walking on ground level. Besides, the incline helps your lower body build strength because it simulates a hiking trip. Walking on an 10% incline in 20 minutes will end up in 166 calories loss.
