The first day of changing my cardio strategy to two 15-minute cardio sessions instead of one 30-minute session has proven surprising!! What’s interesting here is that for the first seven days I was amazingly consistent. My total daily calorie burn ranged from 2150 to 2190 for days I walked and climbed around 10,000 steps and the workout session varied by only 19 calories from 228 to 247 for 30 minutes.
Yesterday’s total calorie burn: 2290, 100+ calories higher than the general range of the previous week. Total steps was 10,169. I had walked over 11,000 steps on the one day that got into the 2200s last week. But this is even more interesting—I had a higher calorie burn per minute with fewer steps for the 15-minute cardio sessions. My first session of the day burned 125 calories but the second session burned an incredible 165! Did I work a lot harder? NO actually! In fact, my step count was much lower: 650 steps for the first session and 700 steps for the second. Last week I was doing 2000 steps in about 31 minutes so apparently I worked slower yesterday.
I do not know how to explain this except perhaps the body (or at least my body) burns more calories during an initial period of exercise and then evens out the longer the body is working? I can’t recall reading anything to that effect including when I was studying for NASM certification. It’s weird!! I will research it.
Overall, yesterday I got a higher calorie burn from doing less actual work. Considering how consistent I was over the first seven days, I’m now VERY interested to see if I maintain that consistency with higher numbers!
