claries burned swimming vs. running?

I disagree with you posts. Intensity of effort determines calorie burn. The medium for your exercise is less important.

I can do an easy swim or I can do a sprint swim. The calorie burn will be very different.

i was just thinking about, say a bike ride. when i ride pretty hard for half an hour i might have burned 400 calories (according to the bike's computer, for whatever that's worth). if i do half an hour on the treadmill at approximately the same effort, i will burn, say 600 calories (again, according to the treadmill's computer and this is somehwht objective because of the "effort level", but i think effort level would have to be pretty analagous to HR). I was just wondering how this could be explained if the fundamental effort level is the same for the same amount of time, and if so, how this applies to swimming. i was wondering if anyone had come across any hard evidence.....

Agreed. Heartrate probably would be a good independent measure of effort but not perfect.

I swim 2km (80 lengths of a 25 metres pool) four times a week. I usually take 47 minutes to do the swim. I do it breastroke style (cannot swim crawl). How does this time compare with other swimmers?

ghost (indoor record holder at Mansfield State for 3 mile run, 14:42, in 1981 - at Bucknell Indoor Invitational).

This is an intersting discussion and hard to give a simple answer. You can't really go by speed of swimming because a good swimmer can swim pretty fast with relatively little effort (due to good mechanics) whereas a rather poor swimmer may be going slowly from one end of the pool to another yet woking very hard doing it. You don't have that situation in running -- good and not so good runners still expend pretty similar amounts of energy at any given speed of running. As has been mentioned heart rate can give a pretty good estimate of how hard you are working. Measuring oxygen consumption would be better as VO2 can be pretty accuratly converted to calories. I have done this with swimmers and runners on numerous occasions and also have done swimmers in open water, long course and short course pools (and in the flume in Colo Sprgs), and open water and the flume are most costly, long course next most, and short course least costly becasue the more turns you have the more short rests you get during the course of the swim. It may boil down to the simple fact that the worse your swimming technique is the more energy expenditure during swimming

Yea, the worse you are at swimming, the better your workout.

You guys are forgetting the weight/fat factor involved. Less body fat makes you sink in the pool, thus requiring more energy to keep you floating. Fat people have it easy as it doesn't require much energy at all to keep them on top of the water.

As for running, as somebody previously said, gravity is a factor.

**I'M GUESSING** the formula would go something like this:

9.8N/Kg (*) time from highest elevation of foot back down to ground, after both feet are elevated (probably less than 1/2 a second) (*) weight in Kg.

That's the weight/force your body deals with every STEP.

And of course intensity of your workout changes the calories burned...

So who the f*** knows which burns more?

I say 'it depends'

jtupper wrote:

As has been mentioned heart rate can give a pretty good estimate of how hard you are working. Measuring oxygen consumption would be better as VO2 can be pretty accuratly converted to calories.

ya know, this is why the ainsworth compendium of METS has always puzzled me. Supposedly:

number of calories burned by an activity= METS of activity x weight (kg) x minutes of activity.

Given 2 guys of the same weight running 8 min pace, is the sub 2:20 guy really burning the same number of calories as the 4:00 guy? the sub 2:20 guy is running at 50% of VO2 while the 4:00 guy is at like 85%...how can 12.5 METS be accurate for both guys?

it even gets more dicey with biking...2 guys riding the same speed - 1 on a clunker and the other on a titanium frame with durace components.

anyway, METS are used for so many things. am i wrong to think that they just can't be that accurate for measuring calories burned?

Lets us not forget the cooling affect of the water keeps the HR down.

3000 meters could be for a skinny 60 kilogrammer of 1.80 meter

about 720 calories(breaststroke). If you are effcient and crawler at good speed and still weigh thze same and swim 3100 meter in 45 minutes you have burned a good 550 calories.(1:24/100 meter pace) or 45 minutes at 2:00/100m will burn 400 calories(2250m).The same 45 minutes at 8 minut mile pace would cost you: 672 calories.

So swimming isnot as poor as it seems like.Compare it wih cyclingat 150 watts for 45 minutes that is only 344 calories vs. the 400 - 550 calories.200 watts would slightly win though.Butt 200 watts could stress an injury if you are not trained.And i prefer waer any way becasue it is complementary to running.

Just think of teh effects for your joints.The water colls them.There is no weight on them.200 watts is much more stressing. Although maybe still safe. BEst would be to do both of them though. I think if yo run 10 miles an hour you will use bout 1000 calories.So to replace a 70 mile week doeing both a 45 minute swimming session - 60 minutes on the bike at 150 watts would be great.

ultrunr wrote:

Swimming burns way more calories than runniing because water is about 7,000 times more dense than air. Once a well respected exersise physiologist told me that swimming one mile (for a non-swimmer)is like running 4 miles as far as calories burned and fitness gained. of course, if you are a good swimmer then your body will be used to swimming and therefore require less energy.

Actually it's 833.333 X more dense but that's just me being a dickhead.

It's a matter of semantics. When working in the human performance lab, the numbers that were thrown around were:

.25miles swimming = 1 mile running = 4 miles biking

So according to this, does 15 minutes of swimming burn more cals than 15 minutes of running? No

However, does 1 mile of swimming burn more calories than 1 mile of running? Yes

bump

"Actually it's 833.333 X more dense but that's just me being a dickhead.

It's a matter of semantics. When working in the human performance lab, the numbers that were thrown around were:

.25miles swimming = 1 mile running = 4 miles biking

So according to this, does 15 minutes of swimming burn more cals than 15 minutes of running? No

However, does 1 mile of swimming burn more calories than 1 mile of running? Yes"

The running/riding equation is very dependent on the speed, since wind resistance goes up so quickly with speed. It also depends on the terrain (and how much breaking has to be done, as well as the riding posture and drafting/solo riding). At Work rates of decent marathoners (say those on this board, not the top ones on this board or nationally), 10 miles in an hour is not an unreasonable pace for a tempo run. To work the same on a good bike, with good riding technique, you probably need to cover 23+ miles, which I found hard to do at first, but became reasonable as my riding got better.

As for swimming, when I had to swim one year (especially one summer) because of injuries, I decided not to bother with learning the flip turn/kicking hard off of the wall because (as commented on above), you are just coasting for a while and that is not what I was after. Further, I found that arm strength was a limiting factor and the ability of my arm muscles to process oxygen made me feel fatigued even when my work rate was not all that high (it got better over time, but the arm muscles are nowhere near the side of the leg muscles). I think that this is one reason that swimming uses much more interval work with only short rest breaks

Finally, many of the measuring mechanisms on exercise machines (in hotels, at least) are widely off, and usually overstate the work effort.

BTW, good comments by many posters here.

Outdoor swimming has been proven not to effectively lower weight because the cold water triggers increased appetite.

I'm not sure about calorie burn but if you do it outside you'll probably gain the calories back by eating more.

Swimming does not burn more calories. If it did, then I would look like a holocaust victim since I am in the pool 6 hours a day.

6 hours...

Sure, "Michael".

Gary Hall III wrote:

Saying your max heartrate will not be as high is just plain stupid. That's like saying swimming is easier becasue you don't sweat. If you want your heartrate up, then swim HARDER!

You are quite wrong. It is a well-known physiological fact that MAXIMUM heart rate is significantly lower during swimming than running.

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The question is simple: If you are exerting the same effort for 25 minutes in the water versus on land, the calories burned will be the same.

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Again, totally false. At any given level of relative effort, running recruits much more muscle mass than swimming and thus burns far more calories.

One more thing....... Have you not consideered the resistance the water creates? Takes more efffort to more through it. DUH! Bouyancy means nothing.

That's not important. The resistance encountered by the muscles during swimming is negligible compared even to light weight training, amd the fact that water creates drag doesn't mean you burn any more calories- it just means your body moves less per degree of effort.

Swimming is an extremely poor activity for burning calories. It may even be inferior to walking.

One other item about swimming....breathing. When I run (as incredibly slowly as that might be) I can breathe just about any time I want. But when I swim, in order to be more efficient, I will breath every 2-4 strokes (maybe once per 5-10 seconds). This may not bump calories burned but from an oxygen stand-point it is something to keep in mind. How many of the runners hold there breath while running?

This is correct. In Exercise Phys, we looked at charts comparing the amount of kcals burned in different exercises for the relatively same periods of time. According to the text used, more kcals are burned in 'x' time running than 'x' time swimming, at equal exertion levels.