How Many Calories Does Slacklining Burn?

Slacklining offers numerous benefits and forces you to concentrate while also working muscles like your core muscles, glutes and quads among others. But does slacklining burn calories?

Slacklining will not burn significant calories like an aerobic exercise such as jogging. Yoga burns around 190 kcal/hour and walking burns around 211 kcal/hour so it’s probable that slacklining falls somewhere in that range depending on your level of intensity and how much time is spent.

Does Slacklining Burn Significant Calories?

Slacklining can improve your health in a number of ways including working on your core as well as your quads and glutes, improving balance, increasing concentration, improving posture, helping to relax you and possibly helping you improve in other sports as a result. With an increased number of healthcare professionals using slacklining for rehab of knee and other injuries, slacklining clearly has benefits to help a wide range of people.

But can it burn calories?

How does slacklining compare to other popular activities when it comes to burning calories? Let’s assume a 160 lbs person, using normal intensity, aged 35 and being 5’11 (180 cm) in height. Of course, calories burned can still vary wildly due to your weight, intensity, your sex and other personal details but here’s a quick guideline.

Activity	Calories Burned (1 hour)
Canoeing	281 kcal
Climbing	407 kcal
Cycling	351 kcal
Hiking/Hill Walking	302 kcal
Jogging	491 kcal
Swimming (Breast stroke)	407 kcal
Snowboarding	302 kcal
Snowshoeing	421 kcal
Walking	211 kcal
Yoga	190 kcal

What About Slacklining?

Determining calories burned by slacklining is difficult as it’s not something typically mentioned by slacklining pros or fitness experts. The benefits of slacklining that are most notable are more longer term benefits that are achieved over time with practice, as mentioned above.

Plus one would expect that highlining or tricklining would probably burn more calories than regular slacklining.

If you look at the table above, yoga is the lowest calorie killer at 190 kcal burned per hour.

It would be difficult to imagine that slacklining would burn less calories than an activity like yoga at 190 kcal/hour. And if walking is 211 kcal/hour, it’s probable that slacklining could possibly fall somewhere in that range. This would depend on your level of intensity and how much time during that hour you actually spend on the slackline.

Burning Calories

It is an accepted principle that losing weight means you create a caloric deficit and burn off more calories than you consume. The best ways to burn calories are through:

Aerobic exercises: Such as some of the methods described above like jogging, walking, cycling and swimming. You raise your heart rate, build up at least a bit of a sweat in most cases and burn calories.

Strength training: This can involve weight lifting or more generally, strength training which doesn’t have to necessarily involve weights as you can also incorporate body weight exercises like standing squats, pushups, etc. The more muscle you have the more fat you are capable of burning.

You can also do small things to both increase your activity level and reduce calories at the same time if you don’t have the time or desire to do physical exercise. Take the stairs rather than the elevator when possible. Park your car closer to the back of the parking lot and walk a bit farther. Be more active around the house. Get a step tracker to see how many steps you should take each day, find your ideal level depending on your sex, age, etc and try to meet or exceed your step total every day.

In my experience, you can also eliminate or at least reduce invisible calories that you might not think about. I drink a decent amount of coffee and added it up: In an average day I was drinking about 1 quart of low fat 1% milk (a little less than 1L) each day just in my coffees alone which equates to over 400 calories. Depending on your choice of milk that’s an extra 100 – 150 calories per cup of milk. Each latte you consume contains a minimum 1 cup of milk. Even regular drip coffee with milk splashed in each time adds extra calories.

And if you splash cream in your coffee each time, that can add 300 calories or more depending on how much cream you use and the milk fat percentage used, over a day. And sugar? Every teaspoon is another 16 calories.

So I did something I didn’t think I’d ever do. I weaned myself off milk (I was already using low fat milk too!), stopped adding sugar or honey and now I drink black coffee. I also now drink Earl Grey or peppermint tea with no sweeteners added. You can add a squeeze of lemon for some flavor.

People think of food that they put in their mouth but we don’t necessarily think of these invisible calories. Add salad dressings, condiments like ketchup and mayo to the list and you can see where you can cut calories.

What Does This Mean?

I wouldn’t rely on slacklining to lose weight or burn significant calories. Look at slacklining as a fun activity that can help to provide advantages like improving your posture and balance and increasing your ability to concentrate and focus. But for burning calories and losing weight, look at eliminating or at least reducing hidden calories from your diet such as the ones mentioned above.

Try a fitness or calorie tracker and keep track of the calories you consume each day by quantifying everything that goes in your mouth whether a liquid or food. You might be surprised at how many hidden calories you’re adding. I used the free myfitnesspal app to monitor my caloric intake every day for several months to help me reduce these calories.