As a coach I get asked this all the time. It’s a reasonable question, and up until now there really hasn’t been a very good answer. This article is going to highlight some excellent research that has finally provided an answer to this difficult question, as well as provide you with a calculator to estimate how many calories you burn, based off of your specific physical characteristics.

Newer athletes often ask this question, especially those that are trying to lose weight, and it’s always been hard to give a good answer. Cardio movements are fairly easy to figure out, as there is a linear relationship to the work output and the amount of calories burned.

Functional fitness is much harder to quantify due to the variable nature of the workouts. You might be doing power cleans one day, Cindy the next, and a partner WOD on the last day. This means that the best way to figure functional fitness calorie burn is to monitor an athlete over the course of a week or more, and then figure out how many calories are burned in an average class. Wouldn’t you know it, that’s exactly what these researchers did.

Functional Fitness Calorie Burn Research

This research comes to us from the California University of San Marcos and is titled, “Energy balance dynamics during short-term High-Intensity

Functional Training.” As we alluded to above, it is the best piece of research that answers just how many calories you burn during functional fitness.

The Study Design

The researchers recruited athletes from a local gym to wear a special monitor that would track their heart rate, as well as their movements throughout the day, and during their training sessions.

These athletes were, on average, in their early forties and had been doing performing functional fitness for about 2 years. Over the week of programming, they were able to Rx 75% of the workouts, and based on their strength numbers it looks like they were solid intermediate athletes.

Researchers had the participants come in and they fitted them with a monitor, and had them wear it for a week. They were required to wear it at least 80% of the day or that day would not count for data.

They found that on average men burned more calories than women, but when they took the amount of lean mass each athlete had into consideration, they determined that both men and women burned almost the same amount of calories per session.

Check out these results.

Men burned an average of 4143 cal per day

Women burned an average of 2913 cal per day

Men burned an average of 694 cal per session

Women burned an average of 461 cal per session

Each session was on average 72 minutes in length

The researchers noted that most of the athletes spent about half of the day sedentary, i.e sitting or laying down, but they spent a fair amount of the time moderately active, doing things like going for walks, climbing stairs or other movement.

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Discussion

After reading these results I had a few questions. First off, they looked a little high to me. So I contacted the researchers and they provided me with the programming that these athletes were completing.

The programming is equivalent to my competitors program for functional fitness athletes, with multiple lifting and conditioning session per class. Dr. Schubert stated that about a third of each days programming was completed outside of the standard class hour, which most likely accounts for the amount of moderate activity throughout the day.

I really like this research for a variety of reasons. First, it uses a typical functional fitness athlete who is dedicated to training but isn’t trying to compete at the games. Secondly, they captured daily activity, as well as what was happening during the WOD, which is much more useful than just the few minutes of high output during the WOD.

After speaking with Dr. Schubert, and reading the research carefully, I think this passes the smell test. If you compare the amount of output from a hard rowing or assault bike session, which are max outputs for an athlete, then you’ll find that the calories per minute are right in line with those numbers. This is why I incorporated their data into a calorie burn calculator for functional fitness athlete.

The Functional Fitness Calorie Burn Calculator

Long time readers of this website will no doubt remember that I’ve put together a nutrition tool that will program calories, macros, and track your body fat for those trying to gain, lose, or maintain weight.

I have taken the liberty to update this tool using the data provided from the research. Now all you have to figure out is the amount of time you are exercising, and the tool will figure out the details of your diet break down.

DOWNLOAD THE CALORIE BURN CALCULATOR

You can see that you will need to take a few body measurements. These measurements are used to calculate your body fat, which allows us to figure out exactly how many calories you burn during your routine.

Once you download the calculator, you should check out the read me section first, but I’ll quickly cover how to use this new sheet.

All red sections are boxes you fill out. For weight lifting, consider each set as one minute of exercise. Here is an example.

Back Squat 3 x 5 = 3 minutes of exercise

12min WOD = 12 min of exercise

Total = 15min

You’ll note in the other sections of the nutrition tool that the activity calculator automatically imports your calories to the sheet you are using. All you have to do is fill out your data and then you’ll have your own custom macro and calorie recommendation.

If you want to learn even more about nutrition, and functional fitness then check out my ebook!

Final Thoughts

It’s great to see quality research starting to look into functional fitness specific questions, but I alway remind everyone that more research is needed to validate these numbers.

From my own experience I think these calorie burn numbers are spot on, but more research would be able to scientifically verify that. As always these types of calculators are only a starting place. If you are sedentary for huge chunks of the day, or do a lot of non traditional fitness activity, you might find that your estimates are a bit off.

Use this calculator and these nutrition tools to help you get on the right track, but feel free to make adjustments if you need to. Now get out there and start training!

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