This is how many calories you burn downhill skiing, snowboarding, and participating in all the other Winter Olympics sports.
Winter Olympics sports torch serious calories.
Ethan Shaw/Getty Images
Athletes at the Winter Olympics posses some wildly different skills. Some can hurtle head-first down an ice track at 90 miles per hour. Others can rotate four times in the air in a fraction of a second — and make it look easy. Many perform death-defying flips and jumps while strapped to skis and snowboards.
These athletes do have one thing in common, though: When they’re competing and training, they all burn calories.
INSIDER looked through data from the Compendium of Physical Activities (CPA) — a research-backed list of calories burned by different activities — to learn how many calories are burned performing Winter Olympics sports.
Note that all the following calculations are based on a 150-pound person. If you weigh more or less, use this simple formula to get a more accurate calculation for you. Also, for some sports, the CPA only has estimates of calorie burn rates — all those sports are noted below.
Downhill skiing with moderate effort burns 360 calories per hour.
The CPA doesn’t have data on freestyle snowboarding, which is seen at the Olympics.
One Olympian told INSIDER that it’s basically the equivalent of a Chipotle burrito per hour .
Cross-country skiing at 4 miles per hour, with moderate effort, burns 610 calories an hour.
Source: Olympics
The CPA doesn’t have data on skeleton, the sport that looks like luge except that athletes race head first down the track .
If all the sweeping and yelling still confuses you, here’s a simple guide to how curling works .
For non-Olympic athletes, general ice skating burns roughly 475 calories an hour.
Non-competitive play burns 540 an hour.
Plain old fast skating — faster than 9 miles per hour — burns an estimated 610 calories an hour.
Want more? Read all of our coverage of the Winter Olympics here .
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