Good Monday morning FitnessGear101 readers!

I wanted to take this opportunity to introduce and welcome Eric Sparling, our very talented new writer. You'll be sure to see Eric's name popping up on the blogs and forums over the next little while. I wanted to introduce Eric and share his fantastic article on winter calorie burn! It asks the question: Does working out in the cold really burn more calories?

Keep reading to find out...

~ Anna

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Shiver Slim: The cold weather calorie burn

By Eric Sparling

Have you heard about the latest diet trend? It’s called Shiver Slim. All you have to do is sit outside on a cold day, dressed in your swimsuit, and the pounds will melt away.

If you’re not familiar with this weight-loss scheme, that’s because it’s a figment of my imagination. Still, it’s worth considering if it might actually work.

You see, cold is the absence of heat. Warming something, whether it’s a room or a human body, takes energy. It stands to reason that exercising in the cold might burn more calories than exercising in an environment with a moderate temperature, right?

Well, the answer to this question is more complicated than it would initially seem.

Professor Wayne Askew, PhD, says that outdoor winter activities do offer a small, bonus calorie burn. Askew is a director at the University of Utah’s College of Health. He says that appropriately-dressed winter exercisers might see as much as an additional 10 percent calorie burn. He attributes this to the energy required to heat air entering the lungs, as well as air seeping into clothes, and the extra challenge of moving on an often slippery surface. This number could conceivably go up if the exerciser was wearing exceptionally bulky clothing—more mass—or was traveling through deep snow.

But that’s not the unclad scenario we started with. Emily Hayes, PhD, is a professor at Florida State University. She summarizes a University of Aberdeen, Scotland study published in Medicine and Science in Sport and Exercise in 1997: Men rode stationary bicycles in 70-degree F, 52-degree F and 39-degree F conditions, dressed only in shorts, socks and shoes. The result? After 75-minutes, energy expenditure was almost 30 percent greater at the lowest temperature compared to the highest. The downside, however, was that the test subjects were unable to continue beyond 80 minutes, presumably because they were too cold.

“Shivering might be good for increasing caloric expenditure, but it is terrible for performance,” says Bob Hickner, PhD, a professor at East Carolina University; to burn extra calories you need to drop your body temperature to a level that’s low enough to impede your ability to exercise in the first place. He contends that a hot environment is associated with increased calorie burn because it forces the body to work as it sheds heat through sweating.

Cancel the infomercials. It looks like the Shiver Slim diet would be an unpleasant way to burn a pretty small number of calories. I’ll give Dr. Askew the final word on this hot and cold subject: “Whichever environment encourages you to exercise for the longest and most frequent is most likely best.”