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How Many Calories Does Your Sport Really Burn?
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How Many Calories Does Your Sport Really Burn?

People exercise for a variety of reasons, including recreation and health, but just how many calories do certain sports really burn and what does that translate to in terms of food "earned"?

Whether your goal is losing weight or just maintaining your current body composition, different sports use different amounts of energy.

NPR pulled together a video that reveals "how sporty is your sport."

Photo credit: Shutterstock

Fishing, for example, results in about 238 calories burned per hour while cycling can burn over 600 calories per hour and running nearly 800 calories.

Watch NPR's video for more, keeping in mind that these calorie expenditures aren't exact (things like gender, height, weight and intensity could result in more or less energy used):

A separate story on other research that appeared in Reuters this week looked into how exercise translates into the perception of food "earned."

The study from researchers at the Children’s Health and Exercise Research Center of the University of Exeter found that people, more often than not, chose amounts of food — a "reward" — that was not equal to the amount of calories they burned.

The researchers had about 100 teens and adults play a variety of sports for an hour, then had them estimate with the help of guides how many calories they think they burned and how much food or drink they could eat to make up for it.

The study participants underestimated their energy expenditure by about 500 calories, the researchers found.

"Potentially this might be seen as encouraging, but as we pointed out in the paper, we have qualitative evidence that their intentions would have been to actually eat more when the training had finished, even though they were reporting by underestimating," senior author on the study  Craig Williams told Reuters, noting a few other possible limitations in the study published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition as well.

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