Calories burned in 1 hr caving

domestosbend

New member
Anyone prepared to guesstimate a rough figure for 1 hr caving - for average pace, fitness, experience, trip. A search reveals this has been discussed before but couldn't see anyone come up with a number. I need to plug it into to my fitness app for my annual (non sustainable)  weight loss plan. Cheers
 

Fulk

Well-known member
I don't know, but could you wear your fitness thingy when caving and measure it directly?
 

maxf

New member
A nights (2/3 hrs) easy digging/ bag hauling was about 300 calories when i tried it on my watch
 

nearlywhite

Active member
Depends on a fair few things unfortunately, no one's ever tried to quantify it:

Type of caving - ropework/srt, swimming, climbing, crawling
Body weight
Temperature (this one's more wet vs dry trip)
Intensity of caving - dawdling, running etc.

The trouble with wearing it and using that to measure directly is that uses heart rate and underestimates energy burnt on high intensity (so if you do a lot of climbing/hauling it might underrepresent it a lot).

I think you're best off finding a comparable activity and substituting that in. And by 'substituitable' I mean something that makes you just as tired - you notice once people learn how to cave not only are they stronger but they cave more efficiently and so burn less.

PS My best guess would be 300 per hour for a dryish trip with a bit of climbing going at a comfortable speed.
 

adam

Member
My guess is that it is so variable, based on the factors you've listed, as to make an average figure almost meaningless. Having said that, if you do want a value, your best bet is probably to pluck a figure from a range of sports for which there are already values, e.g. http://nutristrategy.com/caloriesburned.htm

Why not average:
Climbing hills, carrying up to 9 lbs
Hiking, cross country
Rock climbing, mountain climbing
Walking 3.0 mph, moderate

Based on the trip, you could also throw in:
Loading, unloading car
Rock climbing, rappelling
Scuba diving
Shoveling snow by hand
Carrying heavy loads

Have fun!
 

mudman

Member
I seem to remember that caving is supposed to be second only to cross-country skiing. So maybe find cross-country skiing in the list and knock a bit off?  :confused:

Edit: Just looked it up in the useful list from above. It seems there are a few types of cross-country skiing and even doing that uphill isn't the most energetic (running fast comes out top).
 

droid

Active member
If you're sitting around waiting for people to get up a pitch you'd probably add Calories not use them up... :LOL:
 

Simon Beck

Member
mudman said:
I seem to remember that caving is supposed to be second only to cross-country skiing. So maybe find cross-country skiing in the list and knock a bit off?  :confused:

Edit: Just looked it up in the useful list from above. It seems there are a few types of cross-country skiing and even doing that uphill isn't the most energetic (running fast comes out top).

The cross country skiing I did very intensely over a short period many years ago, mainly in built up area's and fairly level forests was very demanding, a helluva lot more than caving.
 

royfellows

Well-known member
For burning off calories and keeping super fit, there is nothing like karate, seriously. I keep a kitchen wipe inside the top of my gi for use as a sweat rag. And its not an age thing, I was the same years ago. An all day course I would take a spare gi top to change into.
 

Chocolate fireguard

Active member
Just thinking about something fairly straightforward like climbing a free-hanging pitch:

An 80kg caver climbing a 10m pitch needs to convert mgh = 80*9.81*10 Joules of energy to Gravitational Potential energy.
That's about 8000J.

4.2J is 1 calorie (small c)    -    if anybody is as old as me and remembers the Mechanical Equivilant of Heat!

The Calories (capital C) dieticians use are kilocalories (1000c) so 1C is 4200J.

That's handy because it means the 8000J is about 2C.

Googleing "efficiency of human body" seems to give values between about 15% and 25%, so taking 20% as about right it means that to produce 2C of useful work you have to burn 10C of food.

Handy again because that's 1C burned per metre climbed (for an average 80kg caver).

So a steady plod out from the bottom of Titan (170m?) means 170C burned, and most SRT cavers will be able to do that in an hour without feeling they are pushing any limits.
I am sure there are lots of hour-long caving and digging sessions that are much more strenuous, and involve much use of arm muscles, awkward stretches, lifting bags etc where you can't get into your stride like you can on a steady rope climb.

I reckon the numbers suggested so far are perfectly sensible.
 

pwhole

Well-known member
Viewed from the perspective of one Mars bar = 1 full prussick of Titan, you can see why there's so many fatsos.
 

Graigwen

Active member
I did work out a year or so ago that spending a day hauling 3 tonnes of dolomite up a 15m shaft added 441,450J of GPE to the rock. Then there were frictional losses in the pulley system, as well as the unquantifiable inefficiecy of muscles.

No wonder I was eating Snickers bars by the half dozen!

.
 

mikem

Well-known member
Apparently US cavers are hauling more weight, as they reckoned about 500:
http://www.forums.caves.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=522

But there has actually been research, suggesting above figures are nearer the mark:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5291484/#!po=26.7857

Mike
 

Rachel

Active member
I usually put it into my fitness pal as hillwalking, but half the activity time to account for waiting at pitches and general faffing.
 

Kenilworth

New member
domestosbend said:
Anyone prepared to guesstimate a rough figure for 1 hr caving - for average pace, fitness, experience, trip. A search reveals this has been discussed before but couldn't see anyone come up with a number. I need to plug it into to my fitness app for my annual (non sustainable)  weight loss plan. Cheers

Caving is wildly variable. Averages are hard to come by and useless anyway. Specificity is needed to get any real answer, but since this is for a "weight loss plan" that you intend to abandon shortly I suppose you can enter whatever number you please.
 

chunky

Well-known member
pwhole said:
Viewed from the perspective of one Mars bar = 1 full prussick of Titan, you can see why there's so many fatsos.

Hey I resemble that remark........bugger.... resent, I meant resent! [emoji23][emoji23][emoji23]

Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk
 

caving_fox

Active member
droid said:
If you're sitting around waiting for people to get up a pitch you'd probably add Calories not use them up... :LOL:

Being cold burns extra calories.

I always thought that a decent weekend's caving was a net positive in calories. I probably do 12 hours of caving over the weekend, and certainly be pretty tired sunday night/monday morning.

However then I'd remember the curry on the way down and a 'couple' of social pints Friday night meeting everyone, and the fried breakfast, plus a bit of chocoloate, a huge dinner and a few more 'social' pints, another fried breakfast Sunday morning, and a bit more chocolate to keep me going during the sunday trip and a bit of cake when we got out, and suddenly it didn't seem like I'd been exercising enough!
 
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