How much can you burn from a quick 20 minute weight session ?

Let me be a bit more specific about what is happening here:

I was planning on going for a run but not only is it still very very cold out but it started to frozen rain right about the time I was planning on heading out. I'm pretty gutsy when it comes to cold weather running but I am not tempting fate with that. Not only is it a great way to freeze your ass off no matter what sort of stuff you are wearing but it also has a tendency to make slick spots on the running paths and i'd rather not twist my ankle or faceplant just because I wanted to get a 30 minute run in.

instead I headed to my apartment complex gym, which isn't very nice and doesn't have a lot of equipment but provided that I am the only person in there and this is often the case, there are enough exercises that I can get a bit of this and a bit of that in.

I was never trying to lift anything terribly heavy but just do what I like to call "reminding my muscles that I still need them."

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We have dumbbells from 2.5 to 25 kg as well as a multigym that is a bit nicer than the one in the picture. Here are the exercises that I did.

• Lat pulldowns
• bicep curls
• hammer curls
• triceps kickbacks
• modified triceps pulldown with lat pulldown bar (close grip)
• machine bench
• leg extension
• situps
• shoulder fly
• shoulder forward lifts

I did these at about 50% of my max weight in no particular order. I only took about a minute break a couple of times during the duration.

As expected this does not burn a tremendous amount of calories and I wasn't expecting it to do so. When I do my zone 4 jogs, I burn around 400 calories an hour so to burn 117 in 22 minutes? I'm pretty ok with that. Next we will look at the heart rate.

no real surprises here and I think the spike where it went up to 166 may actually be a bogus readout. I was never really working very hard in a cardiovascular sense.

So why did I do this? Well because I doubt the weather is going to change enough for me today in order for me to get any cardio outside. I refuse to run on treadmills and even if I didn't the one that we have in our gym is a real piece of crap that nobody ever uses. I'm not even sure that it actually works at all.

I like to get some, just any, exercise in every single day and this is the first time I have done any sort of fast-forward weight training.

Afterwards I actually felt a little bit shattered and tired, plus my arms feel a bit shaky because I didn't take any breaks other than to try to switch up muscle groups so that I didn't accidentally overload any one particular group.

I think the lesson learned here is that with this sort of no break exercise and keeping my heart rate in zone 2 for the most part that I am burning about the same amount of calories that I would be burning if I was jogging. The only issue here is that I don't really think I could possibly keep this up for the same amount of time that I would normally spend running.

Just about anything burns calories aside from sitting on the sofa and I am glad I got up there and got motivated to do something. It's good to know for the future I guess.

Of course there is always the very real possibility that my sport watch, which wasn't expensive, could be giving me slightly bogus readouts as well. This is something I have considered. It's more than doing nothing, and that was the whole idea.