Work Out With Your Dog - How Animal Agility Training Can Burn Calories For You

Nov 9th 2010

If you've ever seen a canine agility competition, you may have thought, "That would be an excellent way to burn off some of my dog's energy," but you probably gave significantly less thought to what kind of workout it would give you.

Vigorous Exercise for Dog and Human
Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Department of Kinesiology have studied the impact on humans during canine agility training, and their findings were recently highlighted on Zoom Room Dog Agility Training Center's website.

The researchers looked at oxygen consumption (using a face mask and battery-operated, portable metabolic system that measures breath-by-breath gas exchange) as well as heart rate (detected and recorded using a Polar heart rate monitor). The data collected was translated into Metabolic Equivalents, or METs, a way of comparing how much energy a person expends at rest versus during a given activity.