Skate Away Your Calories!

by Michael Garvin

Looking to get fit? Want to burn off that winter fat? Want to have fun outside? Want to meet other athletes? All of these things can be accomplished by simply strapping on your inline skates and getting outside. Roll your way to a healthier lifestyle!

Being more active, even for just 20-30 minutes a day, can not only help you loose weight but help your body become healthier and lower the risk of health conditions such as heart disease. Through sports you can find new friends, and even develop your self confidence.

Inline skating is ideal for these kinds of goals. Through skating you will meet other skaters, not just for getting fit, but also for social activies (many skate sessions can end at the local pub!). Compared to running, skating has a far lower impact on your joints and can give you the same fitness benefits as moderate running and cycling. Some research has actually shown that skating is better at developing leg and hip muscles because it is much harder to coast on skates then while cycling.

Inline skating also offers convience, your work out can be done simply by skating around the city, skating to/from work, or through a park. Although skates, a safety helmet and wrist guards are necessary equipment, they can be purchased as most sporting goods stores and modern skaters are not only comfortable but quite fashionable as well!

Think your age might stop you from skating? Think again! While it is true that younger skaters train more aggressively, many older skaters not only skate, but skate competitively. It not uncommon to find skaters in full marathons (42km races) who are 40+, 50+ and even 60+ in age. Although more rare, there are usually even participants over 70 years in age.

If you have never skated before, don't worry, its an easy sport to pick up. There are technical skills to learn, but most cities have public programs or local skate clubs where you can learn to skate. Learning to skate may even only require a few drop in sessions at 1 hour skate clinics. Sometimes these clinics are even free! Once you've mastered the basic skills, you will be ready to start skating away the calories!

When exercising you may actually want to try doing differnt sports at the same time. For example cycling once a week, jogging once a week, and skating once a week will help you achieve a higher fitness level but also give you something different to do each time out. Sometimes keeping yourself motivated is the hardest part of working out! Establishing a consistent habbit can be the most important building block to getting fit.

After exercising, your body adapts and becomes better trained to handle the activity. However if you do not repeat the activity within 5 days, your body will loose its adaptation, or "de-train". To get the most out of exercising you should plan to excercise 3-5 times a week. Leaving 2 or more days for rest will allow your build to recover from any particularly hard exercise sessions.

As with other sports activities, if you plan on exercising intensly you should consult your doctor if you have any medical conditions (such as high blood presure). When having an intense workout session plan some time for warming up and cooling down with lower intensity exercise. Giving your body time to adjust to differing levels of physical stress can avoid common injuries.

Skating and Other Sports

For fitness training, running, cycling and skating are all excellent choices that can be done close to home, on the way to work and can be easily modified for different intensity levels. There are many other sports you could could try as well, however skating compares well to running, and cycling because they all make heavy use of your legs.

While cycling is more efficient than skating, both skating and cycling make heavy use of the legs for power. Cycling can develop some upper body strength but skating is naturally suited to developing more upper leg and hip power because of the lateral (side-to-side) motion involved. Skating can be as intense as cycling, and in some cases even more intense, since inline skate wheels are much more prone to friction then a bike.

Skating is normally as intense as light-to-moderate running. When sprinting though skating can approach the same intensity levels as running. Skating is has far less impact on the leg and knee joints though. The side-to-side motion of skating means that there is far less stress being placed on the knee joint.

The Skating Burn

Skating is an excellent sport for burning unwanted calories. To burn off calories you can skate at a leisurly pace, and if you want to burn more, just skate faster! Calorie burn is related to factors such as age, body weight, and fitness level. This means that getting an exact measure of calories burned during exercise can be very difficult. However, studies have been done to provide a rough classification of how many calories are burned during sports activities. Usually these studies will provide a rough measure for calories burned for each kind of sport, and at various intensity levels.

The most general approach to measuring calorie burn is the MET or Metabolic Equivalent. Its a measure of how many calories you would burn durnig a fixed time at a fixed intensity level, and is related to body weight. For example the MET value for sitting quietly is 1.0 and if you weigh 60Kg then you would burn 60 calories per hour, just by sitting quietly!

Acording to The Compendium of Physical Activities (a 2002 study from the Prevention Research Center, Unv. South Carolina), the MET value for inline skating is 12, this is in comparison to a MET value of 10 for vigorous cycling, a MET of 4 for jogging, an a MET of 13-15 for vigorous running.

For inline skating a research study was conducted at M.I.T. sponsored by Rollerblade, one of the early inline skating equipment manufacturers. This study generated data that could be used to easily relate the speed of a skating session to the calories burned. This relationship is shown in the chart below:

As with the MET approach to measuring calories this is only an approximate and general measure. It does not account for individual differences such as fitness level or age. However it can be used as way to motivate yourself and track your relative progress. As you become more fit you will be able to endure longer and more intense sessions, and be capable of burning even more calories.

Weight Loss Planning

Skating provides an easy way to loose weight and enjoy the outdoors at the same time. To burn off a pound of fat you will need to use ~3,500 calories. If you wanted to loose 1-2 lbs per week, by doing nothing other than adding skating to your life, you just need to work backwards to find out how much skating will consume ~7,000 calories.

As shown in the previous chart calorie burn is higher with both body weight and the speed (intensity level) at which you exercise. A leisurly pace of skating 10-15 Kph, a moderate intensity level is around 18-25 kph. The highest level of inensity, usually for sprinters or speed skaters only is in the 30+ kph range. Even at a low intensity pace of 10-15 kph, you can burn 300-500 calories depending on your body weight. Heavier skaters must expend more energy.

For example, a 150 lb skater, skating for 1 hour would burn calories according to the speed (intensity level) as shown in this table:

	10kph	15kph	20kph	25kph	30kph	35kph
Calories	167	461	755	1049	1343	1637

Assuming a leisurly pace of 15 kph, this skater would burn off 461 calories per hour. To burn off ~7,000 calories (2 lbs of fat), this skater must skate 15 hours in a week, or roughly 2 hours a day. By skating at higher intensity, the number of hours could be shortened. In fact variable speed during a workout can reduce the bordom factor, stop your body from plataueing and increase your fitness level even further.

If you don't have a fancy GPS system to measure your speed, try listening to your body, seriously! If you can talk easily and feel no shortness of breath, then you are in the low intensity zone of your ability range. If you are just starting to find it difficult to maintain a conversation while skating, then you are entering the moderate intensity zone. If you are gasping for air and tasting copper, then you are like at or above your maximum effort. Such efforts should be limited to very short sprints. Sustained effort at that level will not train your body for furhter adaptation, and may laead to injury.

If weight loss is your goal, skating can be combined with better selection of foods, and changing your eating habbits, to get an even bigger burn. The above analysis was based on not changing anything else, but if you lower the amount of calories being put into your body, through less processed, healthier foods then you will end up with fewer calories that need to be burned off.

Find Out More

Whant to learn more about calorie counting, MET values or weight loss and skating? Here are some web resources that will provide more detail:

• Find out more about sport nutrition from Beth Mansfield. Beth has writen articles on rating how healthy your meals are, and how to plan your eating for exercise.
• SkateLog.com offers a number of informative articles on fitness and skating.
• The International Inline Skating Association has a brief discussion of fitness and skating, along with links to more resources.
• The Compendium of Physical Activities is availabe on the web.
• Fitnes and SpeedSkating Times (backissue) has an article providing more details on the factors that affect how many calories you burn in a given session.
• Barry Publow discusses how to use the MET approach to calorie count in a FSST article.

About the Author

Michael Garvin is a skater with the Ottawa Inline Skate Club (OISC) and at time of writing was also the webmaster.