Elliptical Calories Burned Calculator
The elliptical is a popular, low-impact cardio machine that is used for weight loss and improving cardiovascular fitness.
What is The Elliptical Calorie Calculator and How Does It Work?
This calculator approximates the number of calories that someone burns on the elliptical machine. It also estimates calories burned per minute.
How does it do that?
Firstly, the calculator determines your metabolic rate or metabolism according to your weight.
What does that mean? Keep reading for a more detailed explanation.
If you take two people, one weighs 150 lbs and the other weighs 210 lbs, the person who weighs less will burn fewer calories during the same exact workout compared to the heavier individual.
Why is that?
A calorie is a unit of energy and a heavier person requires more energy to move their bodies or to perform activities.
Think of it like how a larger vehicle typically uses up more fuel than a smaller one. Weight affects fuel consumption (the amount of energy used).
But this also means that the heavier person expends more calories in a rested (non-exercising) state. This is also known as metabolic rate or metabolism.
The calculator uses a formula to approximate resting calories burned and then it factors in the duration and workout intensity to guesstimate calories burned.
How To Use The Elliptical Calories Burned Calculator
The elliptical calorie calculator isn’t quite as simple to use compared to a lot of our other health tools. However, it’s certainly not difficult to navigate if you keep things simple.
To ensure an easy experience for you, we’ve included step-by-step instructions in detail below.
Step 1: Choose your preferred unit of measurement: Imperial (lbs, hours, and minutes) or metric (kilograms, hours, and minutes).
Step 2: Enter your weight.
Step 3: Enter the number of workout hours (.e.g, 1, 2, 3, etc).
Note: You can also use values under an hour. For example, .5 would be thirty minutes and .25 would be fifteen minutes. Make sure to put 0 in the minutes box or just use the minutes box in this case.
Step 4: Enter the number of workout minutes.
Note: Because there are 60 minutes in an hour, the max number of minutes that you can enter is 59. You must also enter either 0 or a value under an hour (e.g, .75 which is equal to 45 minutes).
If the workout is under an hour, we recommend putting 0 in the hours box and entering the number of workout minutes only.
Step 5: Select the workout intensity. Tip: Click directly on the text (e.g., low intensity, moderate intensity, high intensity) and not the empty gray circle.
Step 6: Press Calculate!
How Many Calories Can I Burn On The Elliptical?
The number of calories that you can burn during activity depends on a few different factors such as your weight, exercise intensity, and duration, or how long you perform the activity. Therefore, this can highly vary.
But that’s the point of this calculator. You punch in the necessary details and it’ll give you a close estimate of calories burned on the elliptical.
However, we’ve provided a few examples of how our calculator will estimate calories burned.
According to the elliptical calorie tool, a 125 lb person who exercises for 30 minutes at a low workout intensity will burn 128 calories. That’s about 4.27 calories per minute.
The same person will expend 149 calories at a moderate intensity or normal speed and 179 calories at a high intensity or fast speed.
But let’s say a 185 lb person exercises on the elliptical for 30 minutes at a low intensity. They will burn 189 calories. That’s estimated at 6.30 calories burned per minute.
They’d burn about 220 calories at a moderate intensity and 264 calories at a high intensity.
As you can see, how many calories you can burn on the elliptical or doing any activity for that matter, will depend on a few different factors.
There’s also been some research that’s found using the calorie counter on a lot of cardio machines overestimates calories burned by a significant amount.
When comparing the discrepancies between various cardio equipment (treadmill, stationary bike, stair climber), the elliptical was the most disappointing and by a long shot. The numbers on the monitor were overestimated by 42 percent.
This was determined from a study conducted by researchers at UC San Francisco’s Human Performance Center.
Then there was a study from 2018 that found the elliptical to overestimate by roughly 100 calories for 30 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise. (1)
Things like machine settings, elevation or incline, resistance level, form, machine design, quality, and machine age/wear and tear can affect the accuracy of measurement.
Our calculator is designed to provide a reasonable estimate of energy expenditure during elliptical activity.
Can The Elliptical Help Me To Lose A Lot of Weight?
The elliptical is a great low-impact cardio activity that can certainly contribute to the weight loss process.
But how much weight you lose really and truly depends on your overall habits and approach to your goals.
As long as you create a calorie deficit, and do it the healthy and proper way, you can lose weight. But many decide to go about it the wrong way. They’ll eat almost nothing and exercise for hours in an effort to shed fat pounds.
This is a good way to be unhealthy and do damage that will impede your body’s ability to make progress anyway (an unhealthy body won’t function to the best of its ability). So you might as well do it in a sustainable way.
You want to determine your maintenance calories, and then reduce your calorie intake, exercise more, or do a combination of the two.
Use our weight loss calculator to determine the number of calories you should be taking in to lose weight.
If you also weight train and want to maximize muscle gain and muscle maintenance as you knock off the body fat, our macronutrient calculator is a very useful tool.
It’ll recommend an ideal protein, carbohydrates, and fat intake for you.
Read also: The Top 20 Simple Weight Loss Tips
How Many Calories Does The Elliptical Burn Compared To Other Forms of Cardio?
As mentioned, there are many different variables that determine the number of calories burned between the different forms of cardio activity. Weight, intensity/pace, and duration are the biggest factors.
Although, as an example, there is a study from 2010 that compared calorie expenditure between the elliptical and treadmill, another very popular cardio machine. Researchers found similar calories burned when volunteers did both forms of exercise at the same perceived level of exertion (2).
Although, heart rate was higher during elliptical exercise.
But it’s important to note that this is just one study and again, variables determine calories burned.
If you’d like to compare estimates of calories burned during various activities, we offer a free calculator that includes a database of over 250 different exercises and activities.
Get Your Cardio On!
Use the elliptical calorie calculator to estimate energy expenditure after your cardio training sessions.
Whether you’re looking to shed some pounds or improve your cardiovascular endurance and conditioning, the elliptical is here to stay.
