Quicksand Fans

A lot of people exercise by jogging,bicycling,hiking and swimming and doing weights to keep themselves fit. I wonder how many calories you can burn by wallowing thru a mudpit for an hour just a thought. Your working out and enjoying yourself ...win win

lonesinker wrote:A lot of people exercise by jogging,bicycling,hiking and swimming and doing weights to keep themselves fit. I wonder how many calories you can burn by wallowing thru a mudpit for an hour just a thought. Your working out and enjoying yourself ...win win

I can answer this with some authority. Until my retirement, almost four years ago, my career job was as a professor of kinesiology. [Kinesiology" can mean several things but in this case it means exercise science.] Assuming the absence of pathology affect your heart, blood, or lungs, you can pretty well judge the intensity of any continuous exercise by your heart rate or by your breathing rate, and the specific exercise mode (running, swimming, etc) makes little difference with one exception I will address below. You can even do it according to what you can and cannot do at the same time, provided you are honest with yourself. If a mode of exercise, provided it is continuous, is intense enough that you cannot sing at the same time, but not so intense that you cannot talk at the same time, you will be using between 6 and 10 calories (food calories) per minute. An hour of that, then, computes to between 360 and 600 calories per hour. And lets be honest here, most peoplewill be toward the low end of that range. To carry this a bit further, one pound of body fat represents an energy reserve of 3500 calories, so to lose a pound of fat requires between 6 and 10 hours of exercise, assuming, of course, that you do not then have an extra beer or three afterwards.

Here is the exception I mentioned above. If the mud is cold then you will burn some extra calories replacing the body heat that is lost. Technically, however, most if not all of the replacement heat generation is going to come from muscular activity (probably shivering if things are extreme) and this will be reflected in the heart and breathing rates otherwise associated with the actual exercise as that takes place, so the only real increase in caloric expenditure will occur after the exercise is completed and while you are getting warmed up again. In any case this expenditure of calories is going to be quite limited unless the cold exposure is such as to be rather dangerous.

Ten hours of exercise to lose one pound of fat SOUNDS like quite a lot. No one is likely to sepnd ten hours exercising neck deep in a mud pit any more than they are likely to swim or walk continuously for the same time. However, the ten hours of exercise does not have to be continuous. The exercise during each "bout" of exercise does need to be continuous for these calculations to have any usefulness, but a bout could be, say, fifteen minutes. That is to say, one 10 hour bout will burn the same number of calories as 40 fifteen-minute bouts, assuming the itensity if the same. Therefore, if you did fifteen minutes every day for a year, except for five days off to keep the arithmetic simple, and if you did not alter what you eat, you wuold burn up the equivalent of 9 pounds of body fat during that year.

Now, for those of you still awake, be advised there might be a quiz next time.

The thicker and stickier the mire, the more exercise. Trying to get out of waist deep mud after you feel your legs getting slowly locked in takes one almighty effort to escape! I'd imagine getting out of watery so-called quicksand, would be like getting out of the swimming pool after a few laps.

All I can say is A) I trust Fred's assessment and B) one of the speeches I gave to the models I hired was that while it wasn't my business whether or not they were watching their weight...if they were one of those people who are always trying not to eat food, don't do that on shoot day. They were going to need every last calorie.

I am not sure that lounging peacefully in a mudpit burns a whole lot of fat off, and I've been guilty of mud lounging. But an actual submersion designed to convince people that I sunk to my demise was always was something that I felt in my muscles for the next 24 hours...and I was in great shape and totally accustomed to doing it.

Nessie

From a scientific point of view, how much "exercise" something is has little or no meaning. This is because there are very different kinds of exercise. In my prior post in the thread I spoke of "continuous" exercise. That really means some exercise whereby you do something continuously for the duration of your exercise bout. Another way to label that is the term "aerobic exercise," which technically means any exercise that is fully supported by the oxygen one absorbs while it takes place. Any form of exercise that is only partially supported by simultaneous intake of oxygen is called "anaerobic." If you have to breath harder for a while after you stop exercising, then the exercise is anaerobic. Anaerobic exercise is typically more intense for the involved muscles but because it cannot be sustained for as long a period will burn fewer calories over any chosen period of time.

Muscle soreness after exercise, often the next day, is most related to the muscles having had to produce more force than they are accustomed to producing. The exact mechanism by which the soreness and stiffness occurs is still not well understood.

For the objective of losing weight, aerobic exercise is the recommended approach. You will burn more calories while exercising aerobically for any period of time than you will exercising anaerobically for the same period of time.

There is, however, one very important potential exception to this. Anaerobic exercise in which muscles, particularly large muscles, are made to produce more force than they are accustomed to producing, will, over time, cause those muscles to increase in size. Muscle tissue is metabolically active (which means it is burning calories) even when one is not consciously exercising. A consequence of this is that a person of, say, 150 pounds, but who has larger muscle will burn more calories than a person of the same weight but smaller muscles, EVEN WHILE SLEEPING. That same person is also likely to be more active while awake than the person with less muscle and more fat.

There are caveats to all of the above but these generally affect only a small proportion of people and may generally be discounted by an overwhelming majority of us.

One final point, and one that is not usually addressed in books about exercise. Exercise has many potential benefits that we often overlook. For example, in addition to improvements in cardiovascular health, weight management, ability to be active, and prevention or reduction of muscle and joint injuries, there are psychological benefits as well. Management of stress, and even catharsis may be among those benefits for many. The mode of exercise (swimming, running, playing in mud, etc.) will produce greater or lesser effects on the various potential benefits. All of which is to say that if you get pleasure, relaxation, or whatever else you like from moving around in neck-deep mud, then go for it.

There is a great deal in my country where professional long distance skiers exercise on the bogs and mires. There is videos/pictures with professional athletes jumping into bog holes because of the sport and challenge. I also have relatives, a sportsman in the 1930s that kinda "invented" the concept of running on bogs and mires because of the extra training it yielded.
There is one professional male skier in my country that i almost believe is a closet quicksand fetishist. Because he seems overjoyed of finally be able to trash around in a muddy thick bog dyke. Which he ofcourse does with his girlfriend whom is also a professional skier.

I wish that was the case here. Unfortunately the United States is truly the land of the ridiculously uptight where the religious right walk around with sticks up their asses. If you dare to do anything outside the norm, they’ll be quick to call you out on it. And I’m one that’s not known for following the accepted norms in our society. No doubt you moderators have already figured that out. Frankly, I just don’t give a fuck what others think about me. At 58, I’m going to do whatever I want as long as I’m not hurting others in the process. I really don’t like hurting others. But they’re welcome to think I’m weird or what not all they want. I tend to wear clothing that’s performance oriented, thus, when I go to the gym, I wear compression tights and a compression shirt. They force oxygen into my blood faster than would happen otherwise, increasing my performance and allowing me to lift heavier weights for a longer period of time. When I go jet skiing I always wear a wetsuit or skin suit to keep from getting sunburnt while others are wearing nothing but swim shorts. And now I’m more than willing to plop my butt in a mud hole regardless of who’s around. Hell, what’s the worst that’ll happen? They’ll ask if I’m okay and if I need assistance. I’m am and I don’t. Then I’ll ask them if they’ve ever tried it. I’m simply trying to expand others’ minds into realizing that just because they were brought up to believe in a ridged set of expectations that others are supposed to follow doesn’t make those ways right. They’re not right. At one point it was Europe that was stuck in their ways and they saw us as being a careless and crazy society with no expected norms. My how the times have changed. Now we’re the ones with the sticks up our asses, not Europe. It’s damn time that we Americans pull those sticks out and start to live a little without criticizing others because they choose to be different. Personally, I find that many of the socially accepted norms SIMPLY AREN’T ACCEPTABLE AT ALL.