Entertainment

No, sex does not count as exercise

Taylor Bigler Entertainment Editor
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Sorry, but if you thought you could work off that piece (or three) of pumpkin pie by doing a little dance, making a little love and pretty much gettin’ down tonight, think again.

The myth that having sex can burn 100 calories or more during one roll in the hay is wrong, according to this week’s New York Times Magazine.

Professor Antony D. Karelis from the University of Quebec at Montreal had the difficult task of finding 21 young couples to volunteer for a study that involved them having to go home and have sex with an armband that measured their “energy expenditure and other metrics,” in addition to jogging on a treadmill for 30 minutes and sitting still.

Karelis and his team concluded that men burned about four calories per minute during sex, while women only burned three. Men burned nine calories per minute jogging, while women burned seven. The average sex session lasted just 25 minutes, which means that men burned burned about 100 calories, but women only burned 75.

The research team estimated that having sex is the equivalent to walking uphill.

The good news, however, is that 98 percent of the couples said that sex was more fun than jogging. The sad news is that two percent of the couples had more fun on a treadmill.

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