Caving as Exercise

[wendy]

Can someone help me figure out how many calories I burn caving? Something like, easy horizontal caving with a little breakdown and hands and knees crawling, maybe some low man crawls in there too? Maybe calories burned per hour. I know there must be someway to figure it out. Or is there some sort of device that I can wear that will tell me?

[wyandottecaver]

havent a clue but glad to see you back on CaveChat Wendy!

[NZcaver]

Yeah, welcome back Wendy! Long time no hear, long lost moderator.

See if you can glean any good information from this old calories burned discussion. Best wild guess seems to be around 500 calories per hour, but of course there are many variables.

[graveleye]

I know I burn more calories on the hike to the cave than I do caving!!

[wendy]

Thanks for the welcome back. Trying to get back into the shape I was in 10 years ago. Counting every calorie is helping. Being out of shape affected my caving. I just had my cave journal out and realized in the last 3 years I hardly caved at all. I need to fix that. With the upcoming Florida Cave Crawl and Speleo-Ed in the Western Region I think I will be on the right track as far as caving. I have also set a goal to try a 5K in November (the kind that adds obstacles and mud).

400-500 calories/hour sounds good to me.

[Elliott-Hellmann]

Can someone help me figure out how many calories I burn caving? Something like, easy horizontal caving with a little breakdown and hands and knees crawling, maybe some low man crawls in there too? Maybe calories burned per hour. I know there must be someway to figure it out. Or is there some sort of device that I can wear that will tell me?

Not sure what ind of device you would you to measure calorie buring in a cave. I'm not a PHd in exercise physiology but I do that there are so many variables that go into calorie consumtion (even ones like genetics) that most of the devices that claim to measure them are not as accurate as they advertise.

Stuff like crawling and climbing are more strength training activites are I'm sure they burn alot of calories.

[David Grimes]

I agree with Elliot, you are burning calories for sure but I don't think there is a way to know how many even by estimate. One thing is you burn calories normally anyway even when you are doing nothing. The closest excercise I could think of to crawling would maybe something like a jacobs ladder which is the inclinded machine you simply keep climbing with your hands and feet but een that is very different from crawling but you at least may be able to find some average calorie data for the machine.

There are lots of thorough calculators out the if you google them. I doubt any will include crawling but I have seen some that have options for rappelling, rock climbing, and several other things that are common with cavers.

[wendy]

according to the webiste i use to count my calories you burn 324 calories/hour rappelling.

general backpacking is 648 cal/hr

hiking (climbing hills) with a 10-20 lb pack is 676 cal/hr

hiking (climbing hills) with less than 10lb pack is 657 cal/hr

hiking (cross contry) is 555 cal/hr

kayaking is 463 cal/hr

rock climbing is 1018 cal/hr

[jharman2]

I seem to recall hearing that expeditionary folks burn upwards of 8,000 calories / day. Assuming a basal metabolic rate of 100 cal/hour and 12 hours of caving per day that's roughly 570 cal/hour. That's pretty congruent with my experience on multi day trips. I generally try to consume around 3500 calories and it's pretty standard to still loose a pound per day.