General Fitness & Nutrition: Swimming: Calories Burned

Boy, as a runner who swims for cross training, I'm totally impressed with your workouts!  I'm tired just reading it.  As for calorie calculators either here or on fitness machines, take them with a grain of salt.  More or less, muscle burns calories and fat goes along for the ride.  Calculators don't know what percentage of your weight is muscle and what is fat. They take an average.   Males usually have more muscle than females so they burn more calories at the same weight.  They usually calculate calories burned as weight through a distance.  Since swimming is a non weight bearing exercise (fat floats) you don't burn as many calories as someone running.  Cyclists are almost in the same boat because their weight is being supported on the seat.   That doesn't mean you're not working but the calories don't burn as quickly as they do in "weight bearing" exercises.

If you feel the need to use the calorie counter and it varies that much, just alternate using the two options to get an average. As you point out there are a lot of variables in swimming, your workout is scattered with stroke work, kicking, easy/fast, not to mention that you have time on the wall doing nothing. The times would mean more if there was more info available such as reps and intervals. 1:13-1:16 100s is a bit different if you are doing 4 on 2:00 or 8 on 1:30. It would also make a difference if you swim the 100 in a meet and snap out a :53 or a 1:03. 

I've always contended (okay, only for the past 30 years or so) that the formula used to calculate calories burned in swimming is off. At least in recent years they have tried to break it down a bit more. But it's still off. My take is that it was designed for those that would get in and swim a mile and actually use that term. Swimmers use yards or meters, not miles. I don't know why they haven't come up with something similar to the way calories are counted in running or walking, by the distance, not the intensity. If you can burn 100 calories walking a mile or running a mile, why can't you get something consistent based on yardage whether it takes you an hour to go the distance or two.

I would ignore any info that a calorie counter puts out based on a single level of swimming unless you are one of those mile types or are doing open water swims. Actually I would ignore all numbers for swimming, but that's just me based on my history. In college I swam on average 3.5 hours a day during the season and ate at least 5000 calories a day and would lose 10-15 lbs over the course of 4-5 months. And I'd gain it all back within a month of the season ending, hard to change those eating habits. Based on calculated calories burned numbers I probably should have gained about that much during the season.

 

 

ive been looking for such a website myself, calorie burning to distance with slow/moderate AND fast/race, but no can do.. someone has to get in touch with this new website i just jumped on and let them know to update this kind of info, let especially the total yardage vs MILE.... miles?? you gotta be kidding me

I've been able to get relatively close caloric burn numbers for swim workouts,  correlated to calories burned on a spin cycle or bike, when I monitor average heart rate over the workout.  I use both a Garmin Edge and a Polar unit for measurement.

In a spin cycle workout, for my age, weight, etc all factored in, after doing this for a few years, I know that if I average 150 bpm over a 1 hr spin workout, then I've burned 900 cal.  This matches the data given by a few reliable gym machines (treadmills and bikes).

Using this approach, what I did was construct a few 1 hr workouts that gave me calories-burned values for 135, 140, 145, 150 and 155 bpm.  (My LBP or LT is 155, so I can't maintain over that for an hour or longer).

I can transfer this to swimming or other activities (x-c skiing, etc) by measuring my avg heart rate, or just by perceived effort/exertion (which matches my measured average heart rate surprisingly well).

I can't maintain the intensity in the swim workouts you describe; I'm just older and slower.  I call it a "competitive workout" rather than "lap swimming" or "speed work" because it contains a mix of strokes, drills, speed work, some middle or longer distance repeats, and so on, and varies workout to workout.  I usually log 750 to 1000 cal/hour based on perceived intensity (average heart rate).

In a "speed work" or sprint workout you might actually burn less simply because a good sprint workout incorporates lots of recovery time between repeats.  An endurance workout will likely burn the most because of the ladder effect on heart rate. And a "time trial" 1500m will likely be swum at your LT or slightly higher if you manage to negative split and then sprint the last 50 or 100m.

This all assumes that your caloric burn rate correlates exactly to heart rate, which it must of course.  In the end, if you can calibrate your burn rate on spin cycle, gym equipemt or a real bike, and know your body well, you can translate that perceived effort over to estimate your burn rate in swimming.