How Much Exercise Is Needed to Burn 140 Calories?

You can burn 140 calories in less than 15 minutes using a high-intensity exercise; it takes somewhat longer using less-intense workouts. Depending on the type of exercise you choose, how hard you do it and your body size, you can burn your calories with or without special equipment. If you're looking to burn 140 calories each day, use a favorite activity such as swimming, biking or walking or mix things up with different activities.

You burn calories with one of three basic types of exercise: flexibility, anaerobic or aerobic. Flexibility exercises includes stretching, yoga and tai chi. Anaerobic exercises include strength or resistance training and weight lifting. Many individual and team sports are considered aerobic exercise, such as cycling, swimming, tennis, soccer and hockey. Walking, jogging and running are also aerobic exercises. A more intense form of aerobics is interval training. Interval training consists of very high-intensity bursts of aerobic activity for 30 to 90 seconds, then taking a rest or continuing the exercise at a moderate level for several minutes.

The calories burned during any exercise activity vary, depending on your weight, fitness level and intensity of the exercise. A 125-pound person performing 30 minutes of hatha yoga burns 120 calories, while 30 minutes of vigorous weightlifting burns 180 calories and tennis burns 210 calories. To burn 140 calories, she'd have to exercise for 35, 23 and 20 minutes, respectively. Meanwhile, her 185-pound friend, participating in the same exercises, would have to work out for 24, 16 and 14 minutes to burn 140 calories.

Your heart rate can guide you as you work to burn calories. Stay at 50 percent to 70 percent of your maximum heart rate if you're a beginner to exercise. Raise that to 70 percent to 80 percent for aerobic exercise. Sprint or interval train at 80 percent to 90 percent. A heart rate monitor can help you learn when you hit your target heart rate and may come with an audio alert to let you know you've reached it. Many even tell you how many calories you're burning. To calculate your heart rate range for exercise, subtract your age from 220 if you're a man, and 88 percent of your age from 206 if you're a woman.

For a more detailed list of exercise durations to burn 140 calories, use an online calorie-burn calculator. Input your weight, the activity and the number of minutes you want to exercise. You can quickly recalculate those numbers to see how long it will take you to burn 140 calories doing your chosen exercise.