-Estimations of caloric burn per exercise or workout-
Many people believe the amount of calories a person burns in a specific workout or exercise is the same for everybody. While this is partially true your caloric expenditure during exercise will never be constant and will be different for each individual and change from workout to workout. Because of this, it is a fallacy to assume that there is a specific amount of calories that a given exercise or workout burns. Of course general estimations of caloric burn per exercise are fine for your average person but if you are a practicing fitness professional or a serious athlete then it must be individualistic. It takes days or even weeks of testing to properly assess a person’s caloric burn for an exercise or workout program. Some examples of the variables you will be dealing with are height, weight, body fat %, RMR, intensity, time, frequency, volume, weather conditions, stress levels, lifestyle, nutrition (diet), medical conditions, age, posture (form), water consumption during exercise and even the temperature of that water. I did not list them all but I believe you can understand why generalizations of caloric burn can be drastically different of what the actual amount of calories burned for the exercise or workout really is. This is important because we are dealing with calories. Calorie manipulation should be a major tool in a fitness professional’s arsenal. It can literally be the deciding factor of making it to your goals or falling short. Yes, it is unreasonable to perform the necessary tests and data collection to accurately pin down your caloric burn rate per workout unless you have the necessary equipment and are familiar with these types of procedures which unfortunately most fitness professionals are not. Some of these tests will simply waste the clients time and money when comparing marginal cost and marginal benefit so most fitness professionals would not do so even if they had the resources. Estimations of caloric burn per workout will be fine for your average client but always remember that if your client is gaining or losing weight that they shouldn’t be this topic could be a contributing factor.
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