Burning Calories with Cable Exercises

Cable exercise machines offer a variety of ways to get your workout in, so the calories you burn will vary according to how you use this equipment in your fitness regimen. To be sure that your choice of exercise fits well with your goals, it can help to understand how burning calories works and how cable exercises affect that process.

  1. Cable Machine Benefits

    • Cable exercises get their name from a cable that attaches to weights, runs through a series of pulleys, and connects to a grip that you hold while you do the exercise. This gives you the heavy loads associated with a free weight workout, but the machine makes the session safer by controlling the weights and keeping them away from your body.

    Types of Cable Exercises

    • Cable exercise machines allow the same motions as free weight workouts, such as chest press, biceps curl and shoulder press. By positioning the pulleys, they also allow you to perform some exercises that are impossible with free weights. Cable crossovers and woodchoppers are two examples. Different models of machines can be dedicated to a single exercise, or you can change settings to accommodate multiple kinds of motion.

    Typical Calorie Burn

    • How many calories you burn with a cable machine varies with the type of workout you do. Low-repetition, high-weight workouts tend to burn calories fast in short bursts with periods of rest in between. A 155-pound person will burn approximately 300 calories per hour. You can also do a high-repetition, low-weight circuit workout that moves quickly between exercises. A 155-pound person will burn about 550 calories doing that kind of training for an hour. Body weight also affects burn rate, with heavier people burning more calories and lighter people burning fewer calories doing the same exercise.

    Afterburn

    • Cable exercises are a form of resistance exercise. After 20 to 30 minutes of resistance work, a body will burn more calories -- even at rest -- than it did before the workout. It's difficult to gauge exactly how many extra calories an individual will expend, but post-workout burn can contribute to meeting weight loss goals.