How Many Calories Do You Burn When You Swim the Breaststroke for One Hour?

The calories you'll burn swimming vary based on your effort. High-energy strokes that take maximum cardio effort can burn up to 1,000 calories per hour, according to Harvard Health Publishing. Breaststroke calories burnt, however, average 888 calories per hour for a 185-pound swimmer.

Swimming breaststroke can burn roughly as many calories as taking a run, according to Harvard Health Publishing. A 125-pound person would burn about 600 calories while doing the breaststroke or running 6 miles per hour — equaling a pace of running a 10-minute mile. The breaststroke calories burnt jump to 744 for a 155-pound human and 888 for both activities for a person weighing 185 pounds.

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Running at a faster pace, however, will burn more calories than swimming the breaststroke. Stepping it up on land to just 7.5 miles per hour will burn 750 calories for a 125-pound person or 1,110 calories per hour for a 185-pounder. If you can crank out a 10 mile per hour pace — running a mile in six minutes — you'll burn 990 to 1,466 calories.

But there are far less productive things you could be doing than counting your breaststroke calories burnt. Swimming backstroke, for example, delivers a calorie burn of only 480 calories per hour for a 125-pound person, the same as playing beach volleyball, snowshoeing, cross-country skiing or marathon wheelchair racing. Walking at 4.5 miles per hour burns 270 calories per hour, the same as leisurely swimming in general.

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Although breaststroke sears through an average of 734 calories per hour for swimmers, according to the Just Swim Calorie Crunch Calculator at Swimming.org, there are a few ways to expend even more. The speed at which you swim, the distance you swim and your respiratory exchange rate — the ratio of your body's carbon dioxide production to its oxygen consumption — all affect how many calories your body consumes, according to Swimming Science.

Use a calories burned swimming calculator that takes all three factors into account to up your caloric consumption. For example, if you swim breaststroke at 0.59 meters per second — about 1.31 miles per hour — at a slow pace with a respiratory exchange ratio of 0.7, you'd burn about 9.6 calories for every 50-meter repetition according to Nanyang Technological University's calories burned swimming calculator.

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Increase your pace and increase the burn. A respiratory exchange ratio of 1.0 associated with an intense pace ups the 50-meter calorie burn to 15.25 calories if you double your pace to swim at a rate of 1 meter per second or 2.2 miles per hour.