Weird exercise is good

In my journey to lose weight and be healthy, I have sort of turned into a gym rat. I find that I can keep my metabolism up (and burn LOTS of body fat) by working out - daily for me.

Today, my company had a "moral" event. Our company is small (less than 30 employees total) so having an event like this pretty much gets everyone's participation (at least the folks that live close to the main office).

Our event was had at Granite Curling Club in Seattle, WA. It is one of the ~170 curling rinks in the country. Curling is one of those sports that people recognize from the Olympics but generally don't know anything about it. This post is NOT going to try to educate you on curling however! :)

The point is that I really don't know much (ok, probably less than nothing) about curling. But it was an outing and sounded like fun. Without going into detail, it was a BLAST! I highly encourage everyone to give it a try if they get an opportunity.

We curled from 10:30 AM to 2:00 PM - solid. Lots of walking back and forth between goals, sweeping the path for the stone, and of course, shooting. When we were finished, I was AMAZED at how tired I was. So I broke out my current calorie/exercise tracker application (LoseIt!) and discovered I had burned 1,370 calories! Holy cow!

Of course, being the kind of guy I am, I didn't believe the number. So after a bit of online search, I confirmed that was about right for my size (amount of calories burned in an hour is dependent on your weight).

So that got me thinking - what about other activities? What kind of calorie burn will I get? I was blown away by the calories burned in things like badminton, billiards, frisbee and more.

While I have NOTHING against hitting the gym (I go myself every day), there is a LOT to be said for just getting up and doing something. Chances are, you are going to be burning a LOT more calories than you might have thought.

Check out what the WSJ has to say...