How to Estimate Calories Lost in a Walk

Those calorie calculations you might see in magazines or fitness journals are a decent general guidelines for how many calories you're burning during a certain type of exercise -- but those numbers are just generalizations. The number of calories you burn during a workout will depend on your weight, age and exertion level. If you want to get a more accurate approximation of the number of calories you're burning during your walking workout, you'll have to consider your own numbers, not those listed in a magazine.

Things You'll Need

  • Scale
  • Watch
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Instructions

    • 1

      Weigh yourself so you know your exact weight at the time of your workout.

    • 2

      Wear a watch so you can monitor the exact length of time you walked. After doing an easy warm-up of walking or jogging slowly, start the stopwatch on your watch timer, and then remember to stop it just before your cool-down.

    • 3

      Take your pulse two times during the main portion of your walk -- meaning after you've warmed up and are in the "heat" of your workout. Place your pointer and middle finger on your carotid artery where your neck meets your jaw and count the number of beats you feel in 10 seconds. Then multiply that number by six to calculate the number of times your heart is beating in a minute's time. Do the same thing a second time during your workout, and then add the two numbers and divide by two to get an average exercise heart rate.

    • 4

      Enter your age, weight and exercise heart rate into the following formula to find out how many calories you burned per minute:

      Men: (-55.0969 + 0.6309 x Heart Rate + 0.1988 x Weight + 0.2017 x age) / 4.184

      Women: (-20.4022 + 0.4472 x Heart Rate - 0.1263 x Weight + 0.074 x age) / 4.184

    • 5

      Multiply the number you ended up with in the above calculation by the number of minutes you walked to find out how many calories you burned in total.