Running is amazing. It allows you to get a stress-reducing, endurance-boosting workout with just a pair of shoes and an open road. It also burns calories, of course. At a 10-minute per mile pace, you’ll fry about 10 calories a minute.
That’s a solid number, and if you run faster, you can burn even more. But if running isn’t your favorite activity, there are plenty of other modes of exercise that can help you torch calories at a lightning fast rate.
In general, you burn more calories by doing high-intensity weight training than you do running. Most people don’t realize this, though. That’s often because the number of calories you’re told you just burned is typically estimated from The Compendium of Physical Activities, which calculates energy expended through aerobic metabolism. That works well for low- to medium-intensity exercise, but not so well for higher-intensity activities that rely on anaerobic metabolism.
In fact, when researchers at the University of Southern Maine used a more advanced method to estimate energy expenditure during exercise, they found that weight training burns up to 71% more calories than originally thought. Which suggests that a fast-paced circuit workout burns as many calories as running at a 6-minute per mile pace.