If you want to burn fat, running is one of the most effective exercises to do it, as running burns more calories than all other cardio activities. Once you have built up a solid running base of running regularly for at least a month, you can incorporate interval training into your workouts to burn more calories and fat. The amount of fat you burn running intervals depends on your individual body and your running speed and duration.
Interval Basics
Intervals, running high-intensity repeats alternating with periods of active recovery, offer a calorie-burning workout that will help you burn more fat than your average, easy-paced runs.The faster you run, the more calories and fat you burn. The exact amount of calories depends on your body weight, running speed and duration. Your metabolism and fitness level also affect how much fat your body burns.
Calorie Burning
Burn more fat by increasing your running speed. A 150-lb. person who runs for 30 minutes at a speed of 6 miles per hour, for instance, burns 342 calories. If the same person incorporates intervals into her program and runs for a total of 10 minutes at a speed of 12 miles per hour and a total of 20 minutes recovery at a speed of 6 miles per hour, she will burn 481 calories during a 30-minute workout.
Duration
The amount of time you spend running also affects the fat-burning power of your workout. If you do long, slow intervals, you may be able to burn more calories than short, fast intervals, but it depends on your exact speed and time spent running. A 150-lb. runner who does eight 800-meter intervals at 6 miles per hour pace, for instance, will burn 456 calories during the intervals. If the runner does 10-minute recovery jogs between each interval at a speed of 5 miles per hour, he will burn 768 more calories. During a fast interval workout, if the runner does 10 400-meter intervals at a speed of 12 miles per hour, he will burn about 329 calories. Running 400-meter recovery jogs at a speed of 5 miles per hour would burn an additional 288 calories.
Considerations
If you want to lose weight, keep in mind that 1 lb. of fat is equivalent to about 3,500 calories. So if you run to burn an extra 500 calories more than you consume each day for a week, you will lose about 1 lb. in a week. The more extra weight you are carrying, the more energy you will expend when you run. In other words, the higher your body weight, the more calories you burn during interval workouts.
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