If you were around in the 1990s, chances are you know all about the Tae Bo fitness phenomenon. Technically, Tae Bo was developed in the mid-1970s by Billy Blanks, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that the form of exercise reached a meteoric level of popularity.
For those who do not know what Tae Bo is, it is basically a form of exercise that combines elements of dance, martial arts, and boxing. Many people, myself included, found it to be a fun and engaging form of exercise because you get to throw punches and kicks. The host, Billy Blanks, always did a great job of keeping you motivated in my opinion.
When I first started doing Tae Bo, it was via the use of a DVD. I only had one in my household back then and did the same video over and over in my apartment living room. Billy Blanks came out with numerous volumes of Tae Bo workouts on VHS and DVD, selling an estimated 1.5 million sets over the years.
Back then, I didn’t really think about how many calories I was burning at the time, I just knew that my blood was pumping and I was breathing hard while working up a sweat. I actually still do Tae Bo workouts from time to time, with so many of the old videos now being easy to find on YouTube. I will embed an example of one at the bottom of this article for folks who are not familiar with Tae Bo, as well as for people who may want to do a throwback Tae Bo workout.
When looking up how many calories are burned while doing Tae Bo, I found a couple of answers that may be useful for contextual purposes. I tried looking for peer-reviewed studies on PubMed but struck out, so take the examples in this article with a grain of salt. The first one is from ‘FatSecret‘ and states that, for a 160-pound person, a 30-minute session of Tae Bo burns 267 calories.
The second example is a calculator on MyFitnessPal in which you can punch in your weight and how many minutes you are doing Tae Bo to get an estimate. On that calculator, I punched in the same weight as the previous example (160 pounds), and it returned an answer of 367 calories, which is obviously considerably higher compared to the answer listed on FatSecret.
Both answers are flawed in that they do not take into account several additional factors, not the least of which is age and fitness level. Additionally, not all Tae Bo workouts are created equal. Presumably, some are more difficult than others to endure for several reasons, so that is something to consider as well. Ultimately, I think that it is safe to say that Tae Bo burns hundreds of calories an hour, but exactly how many is an answer that depends on the specific person and the specific Tae Bo workout being performed.
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(the featured image of this article was sourced from Pixabay.com, which is true of every image used on this website)