How Many Calories Can You Burn in a Martial Arts Class?

People take up martial arts for all kinds of reasons. However, plenty of people want to know how many calories they can expect to burn while taking part in a class of this nature.

The truth is it depends on more than just the length of the class. Sure, you’ll burn more in 60 minutes than you would in 30 minutes. However, your weight will also have an effect on what you burn.

For example, let’s say you weigh 200lb. That’s a little over 14 stone. If you take a 30-minute class you’ll burn around 420 calories. You can double the burn to 840 calories for an hour-long class.

Now let’s assume you weigh 140lb, or 10 stone. In this example a 30-minute class would burn 240 calories. Once again you can double that to 480 calories for an hour-long class.

You can see then that martial arts training is a great way to burn calories and lose weight if you need to lose some. There’s more to it than that though. Your weight is only one part of the equation. You have to think of the ratio of muscle to fat you have in your body too. Muscle burns more calories than fat, so if you happen to be 14 stone and really muscly, you’ll burn more calories per hour doing martial arts than if you are 14 stone and overweight in terms of fat.

Of course, martial arts is a great way to build muscle anyway. This means the more classes you take and the fitter you get, the more likely it is that your calorie burn will change and improve as you go along.

All the more reason to join a martial arts class as soon as you can, don’t you think?