#WhyRunningIsExhausting #CalorieBurn #ExerciseEfficiency
If you’re someone who has ever gone for a run and wondered why it feels so exhausting, despite the fact that it burns relatively few calories, you’re not alone! Many people have pondered this same question, and it turns out there are quite a few factors at play. Let’s dive into the science behind why running can feel so tiring, even though it doesn’t seem to be very energy-consuming.
## The Efficiency of Human Running
Humans are incredibly efficient runners, which is a great thing from an evolutionary standpoint, but not so great for those looking to burn a significant amount of calories during their workouts. Here’s why:
– When you run, your body is constantly adapting to become more efficient at the activity. This means that over time, your muscles become better at using oxygen, your heart becomes more efficient at pumping blood, and your overall running form becomes more streamlined.
– As a result of these adaptations, your body expends less energy to cover the same distance over time, which means you burn fewer calories.
– In fact, running for ten minutes straight burns only around 100 calories, which is relatively low compared to other forms of exercise.
So, while running is undoubtedly a great form of cardiovascular exercise and has numerous health benefits, it may not be the most efficient in terms of calorie burn.
## Muscle Fatigue and Energy Expenditure
Even though running may not burn a significant number of calories compared to other forms of exercise, it can still feel exhausting due to the following reasons:
– **Muscle Fatigue**: When you run, your leg muscles are constantly contracting and relaxing to propel you forward. Over time, these muscles can become fatigued, which leads to that feeling of exhaustion in your legs.
– **Energy Expenditure**: While running may not burn as many calories as other forms of exercise, it still requires a significant amount of energy. The energy for running comes from the body’s stores of glycogen and fat, which can become depleted during a long run, leading to feelings of exhaustion and fatigue.
## Oxygen Consumption and Breathlessness
During running, your body’s demand for oxygen increases significantly, leading to a sensation of breathlessness and increased heart rate. This can contribute to the feeling of exhaustion, even if the actual calorie burn is relatively low. Here’s why this happens:
– **Oxygen Debt**: When you run, your muscles require more oxygen to fuel the increased energy demands. If you’re unable to supply enough oxygen to your muscles, you may experience what is known as an oxygen debt, which can lead to feelings of fatigue and exhaustion.
– **Increased Heart Rate**: Running also elevates your heart rate, as your body works to meet the increased oxygen demand. This, coupled with the sensation of breathlessness, can contribute to the feeling of exhaustion during and after a run.
## The Mental Component of Exhaustion
Lastly, it’s important to consider the mental aspect of exhaustion during running. Even though the physical energy expenditure may not be as high as some other forms of exercise, the mental fatigue that can accompany running should not be overlooked:
– **Mental Focus**: Running requires a great deal of mental focus, especially during longer runs. The constant forward motion and repetitive nature of the activity can lead to mental fatigue, which can contribute to the overall feeling of exhaustion.
– **Perceived Exertion**: The perception of effort during running can also play a significant role in how exhausting the activity feels. Even though the actual calorie burn may not be as high, if you perceive the effort as being high, it can lead to feelings of exhaustion and fatigue.
In conclusion, even though running may not burn a significant number of calories compared to other forms of exercise, there are numerous factors that can contribute to the feeling of exhaustion during and after a run. From the efficiency of human running to the physical and mental demands of the activity, it’s clear that running can be a tiring endeavor, despite the relatively low calorie burn.
Incorporating other forms of exercise, such as high-intensity interval training or strength training, alongside running can help to balance out the overall calorie burn and provide a more well-rounded approach to fitness. Additionally, ensuring that you are properly fueling your body with the right nutrients and staying hydrated can also mitigate the feelings of exhaustion associated with running.
So, the next time you feel exhausted after a run, remember that it’s not just about the calories burned, but the overall physical and mental demands of the activity that contribute to that feeling of tiredness. Happy running! 🏃♂️🏃♀️
Because we’re all so incredibly out of shape and probably the majority of people don’t run efficiently. We assume because we can run, we know how to run.
On the other hand, 100 calories in 10 minutes is quite a lot if you’re eating foraged berries and roots instead of Oreos and pasta with butter-heavy sauces.
Generally, a mile burns 100 calories. If someone is running a mile in 10 minutes, they are simply not in shape so of course it will feel hard.
When I was in better shape, I would run 8 minute miles for as long as I wanted basically. One hour for about 800 calories is great
No expert here but a couple things:
Calories burnt aren’t static. You have to consider lots of factors, like individual weight, speed ran, and duration/distance.
A car, for example, may have a mpg rate of gas it uses that might be very efficient. But if its engine is out of shape, it’ll use more gases
Humans wear out quick due to the engine, not the gas. Basically, as efficient as humans are, running/jogging is still a good weight loss method because it doesn’t just use calories, it also tunes up the engine so a person can run LONGER or FASTER without getting tired and thus, greater calories in less time.
In addition, if you load a car down with a ton of bricks, it’ll use more gas.
Same thing with a person—if we take into account the same rate and length of time ran . . . People running at a rate of 1 mile in ten minutes: they will burn an amount of calories ROUGHLY equal to their weight in lbs.
So someone around 120 lbs will burn about 120cal, someone 200lbs will burn about 200cal, etc.
So at that point, someone weighing more will get even greater burn—despite moving at the same rate. Walking or running.
And again, they’ll tune their body up for not being worn out as quickly next time.
Finally, avg consumption plays a HUGE role here.
Unlike a car, humans can force down MORE fuel than their tank should hold. If you consider basic daily intakes of 2-2.5cal a day? Burning just 100 as you mentioned is actually a good 5% of the daily intake! So pretty good all things considered.
It’s the excess intake that’s more of a problem because that becomes extra dead weight in the vehicle!
After that run, you will still keep burning more calories than you would have if you had not done the run with a raised metabolism. Your body will also use more calories repairing a building muscle.
I think it might be an over simplification to say a ten minute run burns x calories.
So at 200lbs 42m 5’10”, if I run 5 miles, I’ll burn 1000 calories roughly? What if that takes me 90 minutes as opposed to 50?
Humans are highly adaptable. An untrained person will have a much harder time running a significant distance than a trained athlete. That is because the athlete is able to more efficiently consume oxygen and process waste prdoucts of metabolism. They also have muscles that are adapted to contain higher energy reserves and to produce more force.
“Getting in shape” refers to a host of metabolic adaptations including:
– increased mitochondrial quantity
– increased size of mitochondria
– increased cross sectional area of muscle fibers
– increased chemical buffers
– a lot more.
Interestingly, though, an athlete that trains for aerobic activity, like running, will train different metabolic systems than anaerobic activity, like olympic weightlifting.
The human body is great at holding onto calories. That is one adaptation we have inherited as a way to survive. Running gets easier as you get more into shape, then burning calories gets harder because your body is able to more efficiently use those calories.
600 calories an hour is a lot. That’s 1/4th of a normal daily intake in 1/24th of a day.
Most people feel out of breath running for a short time because they aren’t in peak running shape. 30 minutes is a warm-up to someone who regularly runs long distances, like our ancestors would’ve. The average person doesn’t have the right muscle build and is carrying extra weight up higher, meaning they also need to use more energy to run than someone who does it frequently.
Who can run for 30 min? Pace and jog maybe.
Im curious what activities you’re doing to burn more than running. Running is one of the higher impact exercises you can do in terms of calorie burn. I think you feel exhausted because it’s exhausting.
>However, running is also very exhausting. Most adults can only run between 10-30 minutes before feeling tired.
This is entirely separate from calories burned. If you run a lot runs that previously were very exhausting become far easier but the calories burned are the same.
Pain, shortness of breath, muscle weakness are mostly independent from calorie usage in this case. Those are the things that make you feel drained after you’re running. All of those can be improved by building strength and stamina in the body parts needed (all those leg muscles, your entire cardiopulmonary system) but you’ll keep burning the same calories outside of building better form or something.
It feels exhausting mostly because your cardiovascular fitness is low (and also because your muscles aren’t used to working like that). If you’re otherwise in shape for it, you can run for 1.5-2 hours before the calories you’re burning starts becoming a factor.
Running is an aerobic activity that causes you to take in and let out oxygen more as you’re constantly moving. Running only burns so few calories because it doesn’t use much muscle and once you stop, you also stop burning calories. Compared to lifting weights, it’s not fast paced so you can control your breathing easier and don’t need to intake and exhale oxygen so rapidly. Also lifting weights burns way more calories because your body doesn’t stop burning them when you stop lifting.
Also the calories you burn will differ per person depending on size and distance/speed
Because 100 calories is kinda a lot of energy, and 10 minutes is not a long time in the day to burn it in.
If your baseline is, say, 1800 calories a day then you’re used to burning about 1.25 calories a minute, so about 12 calories over that 10 minute stretch.
If you want to burn 100 calories over that same 10 minute stretch then you’re now working about 730% harder than your regular level of exertion. That’s a big step up. If you’re not fit you’re really going to feel that, and have a hard time sustaining more than 700% above your baseline exertion level for any significant period of time.
Edit: This is also why controlling calorie intake is a much more effective part of weight loss than trying to burn calories after you’ve eaten them unless you’re doing a **lot** of exercise, like a lot a lot. If you’re trying to burn 1000 calories through exercise, for example, the average person is gonna need to spend around 90 minutes to 2 hours doing an exerting activity, not walking or going for a leisurely bike ride. It’s hard to burn that amount of energy unless you’re seriously into your sport… it’s mostly a lot easier to dial back how many cokes and fries you eat.
So a 150lbs man burns about 80 calories an hour. If in 10 minutes of running they burn 100 calories they would burn 8.5 times more energy than normal. I’d say that is pretty significant.
Of course 100 calories is not much, and can be easily undone by a single cookie.
Edit
Say that man runs ten miles. Burns 1,000 calories, boosting their daily calories by about 50% in just 4% of their day. Then because he is hungry after all that gets a quarter pounder with cheese, and a medium fry from McDonalds having a water to drink or a 0 calorie diet soda. That adds back 844 of those calories back, undoing almost all the effort.
Weight control isn’t the only benefit of exercise, there are a ton of other positive benefits.
If you can only run for 10-30 minutes, you’re bad at running: out of shape, inexperienced, or going out too hard.
Yes but what you should be noticing is that over time it takes less time to recover and run, say, another ten minutes.
Running is not exhausting in the least. It’s quite easy and can be done over long periods by anyone willing to put in time to train. The problem is people are soft because our life is so easy. We do not face hunger, or predators, or even the labour of agriculture for the most part. It’s not running that’s the problem, it’s a sedentary lifestyle making us weak.
Because most of us are too sedentary and overweight. If you start running in a few weeks you will get fit enough to run for much longer.
It’s actually kind of a lot, as someone else said 600 calories an hour isn’t bad. Most adults can’t run more than 10-30 minutes? That doesn’t equate to calories it just means they’re totally not in running shape and likely generally in poor condition.
I can walk with purpose for 60 minutes and burn 200 calories and really feel nothing and be 100% fine… And I can run for 20 minutes and burn the same 200 calories and be exhausted and unable to catch my breath and aching for hours afterwards…. It’s not about calories.
How exhausting cardiovascular exercise is depends on cardiovascular health rather than calories burned.
The reason it’s exhausting is because your heart has to work harder and faster than normal to pump the blood needed because it’s not used to doing this. Your lungs are used to being crumpled up in a sedentary position and not having to be used fully as they are with cardiovascular exercise. Your blood vessels are not used to having to deliver the required blood for the more intense muscle use and your muscles are not used to the demand put on them.
Our body undergoes subtle structural changes in response to what we do with it. This is why repeated cardio exercise gets easier with time. The heart remodels to become more efficient, the lungs open up to allow better gas transfer, the blood vessels become better at handling stress and the muscles become better at efficient usage of oxygen and calories.
But the main reason cardio exhausts people who are not fit is because they build up an oxygen deficit and an abundance of CO2 which they then have to work hard to rectify after exercise. CO2 is got rid of though breathing and increased amounts of it in blood triggers faster breathing and increased heart rate. As you get fitter and don’t generate as much CO2 your lungs don’t have to work as hard and neither does your heart.
Of course it also depends on how you run. For most non runners anything more than a few seconds of jogging is going to put the body into the high CO2 area and put stress on the cardiovascular system. For someone who is fit they would be able to jog for a long time without hitting that exhaustion but it’ll hit eventually. Increasing the pace increases the demand and makes the point at which your respiratory rate and heart rate needs to increase to clear CO2 come quicker.
When I was in shape I could run for an indefinite amount of time.
If you’re tired from running you are either out of shape or running too fast
Hmmm I don’t agree with this at all. I run a lot and it means I get to eat way more food than most people without gaining weight. There aren’t that many activities than burn more than 600 calories in an hour and once you get into shape it’s pretty easy to run for an hour or even a lot more.
It’s not about the calories, it’s about the increased oxygen requirement, the heart having to pump lots of blood to get that oxygen around the body, the lactic acid buildup in the muscles, and the stress of hundreds of pounds of force on each leg with every step.
Even then, humans are very efficient, some animals can only run for a minute before tiring out, others can run for maybe 20 minutes before tiring, humans can technically run for hours if they’re in shape.
If there is anything that’s demanding for the human body, and not a necessity like in the case of life and death, the brain will give you feelings, like exhaustion, to try and get you to stop doing what you’re doing so the body is in less physical stress.
People talking about shitty diets ignore you actually do have a maintenance caloric intake that is much higher than what you can feasibly control with running.
Cardio is good for your heart OP but if you want to lose weight you need to be in sustainable caloric deficit, aka, 300~600 calories below your maintenance goal. Build muscle and do cardio through HIIT or SIT to maximize your time efficiency and you’re good.
It’s not about total calories burned, it’s about the rate at which your body can access calories, the rate at which it can eliminate the waste products, the rate at which it can get oxygen to your working muscles, and so on.
Unless you are literally starving your body always has plenty of energy theoretically available to it. You get tired not because you run out of energy but because your body isn’t efficient enough to handle the load you are throwing at it.
This is why if you try to run a reasonably fast kilometre, you might be exhausted at the end of it, but if you just rest, without taking in any energy, you will be able to run another one. And why most people can walk for much, much further than they can run even if that large amount of walking burns more total calories than the smaller amount of running.
There’s a lot of wrong answers in this ELi5.
First of all, calories burned per minute is dependent on a variety of factors. I am in above average to great cardiovascular shape (35-45min of cardio activity a day). Last weekend, I ran 5 miles in 36 minutes and burned 530 active calories according to apple watch and HR monitor chest band. On average, I ran 1 mile per 7.2min ~(7m:12sec) and I weigh 66kg (~145lbs). That averaged out to just under 15 calories/min if you go by the device metrics.
The calories burned are governed by your **weight**, **level of cardiovascular fitness** (extrapolated by your VO2 max which can be poorly estimated by your peak heart rate (HR) vs. resting HR, or more accurately measured with professional machinery), and **intensity of exercise and age**.
The rate of calories burned are highly dependent on intensity of exercise. Intensity of exercise will be ‘felt’ differently by different people depending on their level of fitness. It’s much easier to think of intensity in terms of your heart rate during a given exercise. Look up **heart rate zones** for exercise. Exercising in heart rate zone 3-5 will burn the most calories for time spent, though it’s more complex than I’m making it out to be. Zone 5 is the most intense, where you are essentially near or at anaerobic threshold (point in which oxygen is no longer sufficient to sustain your pace, you are near breathlessness and want to slow down). Sustaining exercise at HR zone 5, you are incinerating fat like a MF but you won’t last too long there. Zone 4 is more practical for sustained high intensity exercise where you are still burning fat. Zone 3 is like a sweet spot for aerobic exercise where you can sustain the intensity for a good amount of time (say 30min) and burn calories quite efficiently without feeling too close to breathlessness.
HR zones can easily be calculated online using your age and a formula. For me, I aim for HR zone 3 or mainly 4, and briefly dabble in zone 5 when I’m running. If I’m going for a run over 5-6 miles, I try to keep my pace / HR closer to zone 3 and some zone 4.
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Tl;dr – *running is actually a pretty good way to burn calories but it depends on a variety of individualized factors, and the pace in which you run. Perceived exhaustion is also dependent on level of fitness, status of muscle integrity, age, nutritional status, and the intensity/duration of the run.*
Because most humans now are out of shape and not used to running anymore. Ie as a species we’re efficient runners, individually, now, not so much.
People who do run often, don’t get tired after 10 or even 30 minutes.
If you keep running consistently, it becomes way less exhausting and ends up just making you feel good.
I run a 5K distance 3-5 days per week and I feel energized and happy after.
But yeah purely for losing weight it’s more about consuming less calories.
What you feel is mostly the strain on your muscles (heart and chest/diaphragm included) , the need for oxygen, and the exhaustion of immediate energy sources (ATP). Your muscles are strained because they are weak, which will improve with training.
You don’t feel the burning of calories. Your body burns calories just sitting down, but you feel nothing. Your premise that somehow energy consumption is directly proportional to feeling of all exhaustion, is false
Because you’re eating fat people calories lol. If you truly think you’re meant to be a jacked up dude or woman or fat you’re beyond stupid . You’re meant to be athletic build or little worse skinny and that’s it . Nobody on this planet was meant to be overweight . Modern day foods ands science gave us ability to be lazy and fat quick , but that completely goes against our body’s needs.