Many of you will know that come Yule-tide, I love to share my home baked mince pies.
My love of baking and love of fitness don’t always go together but since it’s Christmas, it’s time to marry the two and bring you my mince pie workout.
Very Important Mince Pie Statistics (VIMPS)
According to Waitrose, their all butter mince pies contain 234 calories each … gasp … with an M&S ‘made without wheat’ coming in just shy of that at 176 calories! So let’s split the difference and call it 200 calories. One mince pie, plus an obligatory glass of fizz (90cals in the average glass) = 290 calories.
How can we burn off 290 calories?
Shopping Basics versus VIMPS
We’re all about fitting activity into your life. So unless you are an exclusively online shopper, you are probably going to be doing some Christmas shopping during December.
Let’s say the average last minute Christmas shopping dash lasts 60 minutes. According to Bupa a 64 kilo person walking for 60 minutes at a brisk pace burns on average 288 calories.
But how else can you burn off 290 calories?
You could swim fast front crawl for 20 minutes.
You could run for 30 minutes at approximately 6mph.
You could do two hours of ironing.
According to http://www.sexcalculator.co.uk/ you could have sex, standing up for two hours (three if you do it lying down with less enthusiasm).
Or you could sleep for five hours (http://www.calories-calculator.net/).
Of course if you wanted to boost your calories expended (perhaps you want to have a glass of mulled wine or ice cream with your mince pie there are a few tried and tested methods of boosting the calorific expenditure of your workouts:
1.Have a black coffee before your workout. According to a study published in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, caffeine before a workout can help you burn about 15% more calories for three hours post-exercise. Sports nutritionist Heidi Skolnik, M.S., and owner of Nutrition Conditioning, Inc. suggests caffeine is at its peak stimulatory effect between 30 and 75 minutes after consumption.
2.Do HIIT training, or mix up weights with steady state cardio and higher intensity cardio blasts. Training like this can increase your post exercise calorie burn although studies disagree on by how much.
3. Exercise in the cold. When you exercise outside (even walking) your body has to expend more calories to bring your body temperature up. So there’s some evidence to suggest you burn more calories, the colder the ambient temperature is.