Calories Burned Doing Crunches : 0 Kcal
Overview
Crunches are a popular exercise to trim down belly fat and get that six-pack for the beach. Anybody, even those with minimal to no experience working out, will answer “crunches” if they were asked how to make the midsection look better. For the most part, people will attest that crunches are not that hard to do but how good are they anyway? How effective is it to get that fit look? And does it make your belly look better? There are a lot of variations of the conventional crunch exercise targeting different areas of your core.
Calories Burned Doing 100 Crunches
As more information about fitness and health surfaces, the idea of spot reduction slowly loses the audience to the caloric deficit theory. The idea behind the caloric deficit is since your belly fat is burned through exercise, you need to be more active than just doing a million crunches to lessen your gut.
But just how much calories do you burn in a hundred crunches? Calorie burn depends on several variables including your weight and intensity. Average amount of crunches in 1 minute of standard crunch for most of person is around 30. And Doing Abdominal crunches at light effort have a met value of 2.8.
According to ACSM, METs x 3.5 x Weight (kg) / 200 = Kcal / min;
This means that calories burned during crunches per minute = 2.8 x 3.5 x Weight (kg) / 200;
Using this formula, it’s easy to calculate how many calories per minute during doing crunches.
So, for calculation purposes, let’s say you weigh 150 lbs. By average, you will burn 3 kcal per minute and 180 calories per hour while doing crunches. So a set of 3 minutes will burn 10 calories but some do not count minutes but repetitions. The time spent doing 100 crunches is around 3 minutes based on 30 crunches per minute. So you will burn around 10 calories doing 100 crunches, and 5 calories will be burnt in 1.5 minutes of doing 50 crunches. At last, we can know you can burn 0.1 calories per crunches. Doing 5 sets of 100-reps per day (that means you will do 500 crunches a day), you will burn around 50 calories.
How many crunches to burn 500 calories?
When it comes to targeting a specific number of calories to burn, crunches are going to be a steep order. Crunches do not burn a lot of calories and even less if not done properly.
If you really intend to lose fat through doing crunches, you may want to know how many crunches to burn 100 calories. As previously mentioned, for a 150-pound person, calories burned doing 100 crunches is around 10 calories.
With the same weight mentioned earlier, if your target is to burn 100 calories, you should do 1000 crunches. To burn 200 calories, 2000 crunches is needed, and 5000 crunches for burning 500 calories. So, to guide you on how to make sure that you are not wasting your time, and effort, here are a few steps that you can take to make sure you are doing quality crunches.
• Lie on you back with your knees bent and feet flat on the floor. Your knees should be making more or less a perfect triangle with the floor.
• Your hands should be flat on your sides or across your chest.
• While keeping your head and neck relaxed, contract your abdominals.
• Make sure you inhale before you start and on your way down and exhale when you contract your abs.
SIT-UPS vs CRUNCHES
For the uninitiated, sit-ups and crunches are the same. For the most part, you would be forgiven if you think the same thing. Both start the same way (by lying on your back with knees bent and feet flat on the floor). Your hand placement is also the same, whether behind the ears or across your chest. And both exercise ends the same, by lowering yourself slowly back to your starting point and inhaling on the way down.
The main difference between the two is you curl your whole upper body to your knees when doing sit-ups while you only lift your head and shoulder blades when performing crunches. Crunches isolate the abdominal muscles while sit-ups hit other muscle groups like the lower back, neck, hip flexors, and chest. The recruitment of additional muscle groups means sit-ups burn more calories than crunches but since sit-ups incorporate a more complex movement, it opens you up for injuries if done incorrectly. You risk possible injuries to your lower back as well as your neck if you cheat your way to sit-ups. You still can get lower back injuries with crunches but the chance of that is considerably lower.
KNOW YOUR GOAL
Since you’re reading this article, it’s safe to assume that you have a goal in mind. When it comes to working out, people generally have two goals. Lose weight by burning as many calories as possible or get strong, build muscle mass, and not necessarily lose weight. Those two are opposites so you need to make sure that you know what is your ultimate goal before engaging in a particular program with those goals in mind. You decide whether you take the blue or red pill.
If you decide to go through the first path, burning as many calories as possible, then you know that crunches may not be your best choice. There are a lot more sensible alternatives to burning calories than crunches such as incline walking, running on incline treadmill, cycling, and rowing machine,and so on. Aerobic exercises have many proven benefits from strengthening your circular, muscular, and respiratory systems, all the way to reducing stress and improving self-esteem .
If your goal is to build muscle, then you should not be watching the scale as much. Muscle is denser than fat so when you engage in muscle-building exercise, you may be shedding a lot of fat pounds but since you’re building muscles too, the scale will not reflect the fat you shed. The average density of muscle is 1.1 g/ml while fat is only 0.9 g/ml. It’s called body recomposition when you try to shed fat and gain muscle at the same time. When this happens, changes will reflect more on the mirror than on the scale. Now, for this to work though, you still need to make sure that you have a balanced diet and not just munch down on what you can get your hands on.
Are Crunches good exercise?
Anaerobic exercise is a higher intensity-power version of traditional exercises. Compared to anaerobic exercise,aerobic exercises has a higher fat-burning rate. Oxygen requirement is much more than oxygen supply during your anaerobic exercise workouts, unlike aerobic exercises that can obtain enough oxygen to burn fat. Anaerobic exercises use glucose stores in the muscles as energy In fact, just 35% calories in all of the calories burned are from fat while doing anaerobic exercise,such as crunches. . Exercises like sprinting, push ups, pull ups, and weightlifting requires short bursts of energy, therefore people will burn more carbs and can’t burn as much fat for energy as aerobic exercises do with a higher fat-burning rate.
However, there is an interesting thing. You’ll burn more calories from fat doing anaerobic exercise,such as crunches, pull ups,etc, than aerobic exercises in the same amount of time. That’s because of exercise intensity! For example, You walk on treadmill at speed of 2.5 mph and can burn 107 calories. In this case, around 64 kcal (60%) is from fat-burning. But if you do 30 mintues of anaerobic exercise at vigorous effort, you will burn 283 calories, and up to approximately 99 calories (around 35%) can be from fat-burning. In another word, you can lose more fat!
Does abdominal crunches reduce belly fat?
Crunches are part of most physical examinations if you want to join any branch of the armed forces and it also is very popular among most fit crowds. It focuses mainly on the spot reduction theory with the idea that the more you hit a particular body part in your exercises, the better it gets developed. This is why a lot of crunch variations have surfaced and most, if not all, claim that it makes you look great in the mirror.
Crunches are done on short bursts and thus do not require a lot of fat for energy. Anaerobic exercises, like crunches, build endurance in the muscle but do not specifically burn fat in the targeted area. Just like what was mentioned earlier, spot reduction does not work. Your body has it’s own “program” on which part will lose fat first when the body needs to burn some for energy. There is no way you can control that and that is just fact. Your genetics decides how and where the fat stores will be used so doing a million crunches a day is not a guarantee that you will get a flat belly. It certainly will help in your goal to lose fat but it cannot guarantee that you will lose it in the areas that you decided.