Roller skating is a great activity that both kids and adults can enjoy and stay active. It has garnered more attention lately because of the possibility of weight loss.
But you may be wondering, how does roller skating help you lose weight? The answer to this question depends on your motivation for doing this activity.
Roller skating is an excellent alternative to running or jogging since they don’t require any special equipment or sneakers. It is a cardio exercise that can help you break up and lose the fat that built up on your hips or thighs by providing strong muscle building through repetitive motion.
To find out if roller skating is the best way to improve your physical condition, we’ll look at how roller skating can make you healthier and potentially lose some of that weight.
What Is Roller Skating?
It is a form of activity similar to rollerblading but much smoother. Roller skating has been around since the late 1800s and is still a popular sport to this day.
Roller skates are lightweight, made of four wheels with a long-handled piece that hooks onto your ankles and straps over your feet. This allows you to sit on the roller skate and roll smoothly or even hop on one leg.
Roller skating has changed a lot over the years since it first became popular in the U.S. Taking in several different genres and styles you can choose to fit your preference. Nevertheless, if you do it for fun, exercise or something to keep you busy, it can promote numerous mental and physical benefits.
Is Roller Skating A Great Way To Exercise?
Skating is an aerobic workout that uses practically every part of your body, including your muscles, bones, and joints. Skating works your quads, abs, calves, glutes, and arms while you’re doing it.
These are areas of the body where fat can be deposited quickly. It burns fat while strengthening and extending muscular endurance by working up all these muscles. In essence, skating helps you to accomplish two different goals.
Roller skating activities improve your cardiovascular health. Your heart beats faster while roller skating, and your blood flow increases. Your body organs are now better perfused. The metabolic rate quickens as a result. You burn more calories when your metabolism picks up, which results in weight loss1.
In addition, compared to running, walking, or jogging, roller skating puts less strain on your joints. This is because it allows fluids to flow around the joints in contrast to the jerky movements you encounter when running or jogging. As a result, joints aren’t as severely impacted.
Different Health Benefits Of Roller Skating
Roller skating has many benefits. If you skate or want to skate, you can use it to exercise, enhance your balance and coordination, improve your muscles and strength, improve agility and reaction time, feel a sense of freedom while being active, and much more.
1. Roller Skating Burns Calories
Excellent calorie-burning exercises include walking and running. On the other hand, skating for weight loss can simply entail donning your roller skates and taking a stroll through the park.
A nice pair of skates and one of the many roller skating lanes are all you need to get started. Roller skating is an excellent way to burn calories indoors and outdoors.
Skating is a cardiovascular exercise, whether it’s done indoors or outdoors. In addition to making your heart work harder and sweat, skating consistently and eating a good diet will help you lose weight quickly.
Burning more calories can lower overall body fat and reduce belly fat. Regardless of your skating type, you will still burn calories, thus helping in weight loss.
2. It Helps You Build Muscle Groups
You’ll see more defined muscles when you go roller skating more frequently. Roller sports allow your abs, glutes, thighs, and calves to flex and firm up. Your butt, or glutes as they are known in the medical community, get the best workout.
The gluteus maximus, medius, and minimus are the three muscles that make up a person’s glutes. You bend, twist, and turn to get around corners and turns every time you skate.
These movements truly engage your backside, giving it a firm, pert, and well-defined appearance. It will definitely take a little longer if you’re overweight to see muscle definition through rollerblading and roller skating, but as soon as you manage to lose some weight and get rid of the extra weight and body fat, you’ll see that you appear leaner and toned.
3. Roller Skating Helps Improve Your Balance
Good balance is crucial since it lowers the amount of energy you use for everyday activities like walking or even simply sitting, which also helps to lessen exhaustion. But many people find it challenging to do this organically.
Skating is the perfect activity for improving balance since it forces you to maintain a solid core in order to stay upright. Moving forward and backward while using your lower back and abdominal muscles can improve your balance while doing your roller skating session.
4. It Helps Maintain a Healthy Heart
The heart is strengthened by roller skating, inline skating, and rollerblading since they are all efficient forms of aerobic exercise. During moderate roller skating and rollerblading, the average skater’s heart rate will increase from 140 to 160 beats per minute. And if you’re the more daring sort and enjoy playing a roller sport while donning a pair of speed skates, inline hockey skates, or roller derby skates, you can significantly raise your heart rate up to 180 beats per minute.
5. It Helps Build Strength
Although roller skating works out the entire body, there are certain parts that benefit more from the exercise. Skating will increase your body strength, which will also enhance your coordination, help you avoid accidents, and keep you more active.
6. Helps People with Diabetes
Type 2 diabetes is frequently brought on by unhealthy diets, sedentary lives, being overweight, and a lack of aerobic workouts. Strength training and cardiovascular exercise are the two main forms of physical activity that the American Diabetes Association recommends for managing and preventing diabetes, and both of these benefits are already present in roller skating and rollerblading2.
Since roller skating is a great example of aerobic activity, the exercise you get from skating improves the way your body uses and regulates insulin. Skating boosts cholesterol levels, decreases blood sugar, lowers stress, and strengthens the heart and bones.
7. An Endurance-Building Sport
Rollerblading and skating have the added health advantage of increasing endurance. With your increased strength, it will also have a huge boost in muscular endurance, meaning you’ll be able to go harder for longer. All of a sudden you’ll be able to roller skate for longer, run further without stopping, and do other exercises for an extended period of time.
8. Roller Skating is Fun
Compared to most workouts, roller skating is one you can enjoy not just by yourself but also with other people. Fun is an essential part of exercise perseverance. It makes roller skating much easier to stick with and look forward to.
How To Lose Weight Through Roller Skating?
We are all aware that roller skating will aid in our fitness and weight loss. You need a really scientific approach, nevertheless, in order to reduce weight successfully. When trying to lose weight or burn calories, it’s also important to take into account how many calories you plan to consume and burn off in relation to your weight.
Set Specific Goal
Depending on your body weight, you can choose how much fat you wish to reduce. The heavier you are, the more energy you need to perform an activity.
You must decide on your weight loss objective in order to burn fat. Do you want to lose weight? How many calories? Keep in mind that you must refrain from eating foods that contain more fat than you are burning if you want to lose some excess fat. If you wish to burn more fats, you need to lessen your calorie intake.
Do Various Movements While Roller Skating
To assist you to burn more calories and develop your muscles, you should mix doing many movements. Skating specifically helps firm up a number of body parts, including your glutes, thighs, abs, and calves, by causing you to twist, turn, and bend while you skate. Both your quads and thighs will burn as you move your legs forward and backward while skating.
Your skating speed will also have a significant impact on burning calories and how much muscle your body gains. Skating quickly causes you to move more, which increases the number of calories your body burns. You would lose weight as a result.
Pair Skating with a Healthy Diet
The perfect formula for losing weight is consistent exercise and a healthy diet. You need to take in fewer calories than what you burn to reduce your body weight. It is advisable to plan a menu of your daily diet to monitor your calorie intake.
You should increase your protein intake to accelerate the process of muscle growth. For instance, consuming a tiny amount of carbohydrates will increase the absorption of protein to your body’s muscles.
Increase Your Speed Gradually
You must practice hard and focus on the most crucial elements of skating, like the push and glide technique, if you want to raise your speed. In order to improve, you should also practice a lot as roller skating requires skill. By doing so, you will become not only faster but improve your agility as well.
Skating involves many different elements, including technique, but there are additional elements that can affect your speed, including age, weight, and strength. As frequently as you can, practice and build up your strength as you go.
Can Roller Skating Help You Lose Belly Fat?
All forms of aerobic exercise are intended to shape your body. The primary goal of aerobic exercise is to lose belly fat or any additional body fat.
It may reduce and trim your belly fat and tone every muscle in your body, including your thighs, legs, calves, and calves.
However, you can never completely get rid of fat cells from your body when it comes to losing belly fat. The fat cells actually get larger and store more lipids when you put on weight.
The number of calories you burn and the number of calories you take in are factors to consider when you are trying to lose weight. The key to losing fat is that the number you burn has got to be greater than the number of calories you consume.
Roller skating is an efficient way to burn calories to help you burn fat, but not just belly fat specifically. The fat you burn as a result of the activity will be total body fat.
How To Roller Skate Properly?
Roller skating is truly a great way to stay fit and enjoy an active lifestyle. However, skating is not all about speed and is more than just jumping around on blades.
The art of roller skating means controlling your speed in accordance with terrain and obstacles. Understanding how to roller skate effectively can help you become better at skating so that you can carry out all the tricks in your repertoire.
- A pair of skates that are too tiny or too large may cause pain in your feet and make you more likely to tumble and lose track.
- To prevent serious injuries while skating, wear a helmet, knee pads, and wrist guards at all times. If you use knee pads and/or helmets your risk of injury is greatly reduced.
- Avoid peak hours and skate in open, well-lit areas like parks or streets. This entails planning a skating schedule and selecting a suitable time.
- When it’s hot outside, bring a bottle of water with you. During the activity, your body needs frequent water intake. It is important to keep hydrated.
- Dress comfortably so you can move around easily. A wonderful option would be to wear shorts and a T-shirt, or you may wear clothing made of breathable materials.
How Many Calories Are Burned When Roller Skating?
You have to remember that the calories that you burn vary from person to person.
For a person who weighs between 140 and 150 pounds, an hour of roller skating will burn roughly 300 calories. Such a person would burn around 1500 calories each week if they skated five days a week. On the other hand, a 200-pound person will burn about 700 calories when skating for an hour. The major factor is how much force you use when skating.
Additionally, when roller skating, attempt to move your body more. Turn, bend, and twist as much as you can.
Furthermore, the speed of your rollers is crucial. You will definitely burn more calories if you skate faster. Once you are comfortable with roller skating, combine the movements and the speed to ensure that you are losing weight.
Recap On How Does Roller Skating Help You Lose Weight
Does roller skating work well for body transformation and weight loss? Definitely!
It checks off all the same boxes as exercising like jogging, cycling, swimming, rowing, etc., and will provide you with a great fitness workout that burns a lot of calories.
Same with other types of exercises, you must eat healthy food and take note of your calorie intake to maximize the effect of this cardiovascular activity.
You can incorporate different skating techniques during your roller skating sessions to maximize its health benefits. You may try various types of roller skating such as artistic skating, speed skating, inline skating, road skating, roller hockey, and roller derby.
Set clear goals. Decide for yourself if you really want to lose fat. Create an ideal plan and decide how you will carry out your weight loss plan. Make it apparent that your goal is to reduce weight, get yourself ready to skate regularly, and engage in a quality and fun exercise.
