Humor will not be tolerated!! -Portia

I was dissapointed neither of those calculators Foreman provided had wrestling on the list.

Having wrestled for 6 years, I can say without doubt that it is one of the most, if not the most, physically taxing sport. In my prime, I wrestled at 189 lbs, and in a 3 hour practice, I lost as much as six lbs. Now, most of this was water weight, it is true, but even to sweat that much just shows you how intense it is. Part of our conditioning during the season was to run stairs, and this was considered a welcome relief to actually wrestling, since it was so much easier on the body.
The most physically taxing event was known as "iron-mans", in which two wrestlers would alternate minutes with one other wrestler. In other words, guys A, B, and C, take turns of AB wrestling, AC, AB, AC, AB, AC, this would go for as much as fifteen minutes, at least, I don't remember doing it longer.
So yeah, my vote is for wrestling, or possibly boxing. Any thoughts?

I took a Brazilian jiu-jitsu class, which is kind of like wrestling? I agree that it's quite taxing (and man, I got some sweet abs from that class), but I still think running is harder.

I don't think wrestling is aerobic enough. So much of it is just a resistance workout.

This isn't exactly taxing, but my choir teacher always said choir class should count for PE credit. And it should have, the way he taught it.

I was also surprised at the omission of wrestling from those lists. And I agree that it's much more grueling and exhausting than running. Phew! I'm getting cotton mouth just thinking about it.

I don't consider myself to be actually running unless I'm gasping for breath and sweating buckets (regardless of the outside temperature). Otherwise it's just jogging. Wrestling is probably more exhausting than the jogging that most people do, but I really don't think it costs more calories than actual running.

I sampled a number of varsity sports in high school, (in fact all of them offered me save basketball and baseball) as well as a handful of martial arts and alternative activities (rock climbing/rappelling etc.). Wrestling practice was significantly more rigorous than any other training I can recall. Note that it was practice that was grueling, tournaments were days off, for all intents and purposes.

Of course, physically taxing can be interpreted a couple of different ways. While soccer involved less overall running than a 10k, parts the body could often be taxed more (though my knees would disagree with that statement halfway down some of those hills). Football had more impact injuries, obviously, with soccer surprisingly not too far behind. Jujitsu obviously has more impact than wrestling, and in my experience could swing on either side of a wrestling match's taxation.

And that is part of the difficulty in gauging wrestling, while a wrestling match had (hopefully) little impact, it was constant resistance for up to six (seven in the case of ties)minutes. I'd be hard pressed to say which was more taxing, a six minute mile or a six minute match. The practices, though were quite another story. The second link in Foreman's post listed running rates and body weight as factors in caloric count, as well as listing running stairs. Running stairs was equitable to running at 9 mph, which was as taxing for the 155 lb person as running nearly 2 mph faster was for the 130 lb man. A common element in our wrestling practice was running stair laps while carrying someone in our weight class on our back (we were, thankfully, allowed to let them down to descend stairs). While the chart doesn't display what running stairs would be like while carrying 260 lbs, looking at the trends I think it'd be safe to assume it would outrank anything shy of a four minute mile. Also, our practices tended to last three or more hours, which included no small amount of running, (I don't think we ever went much over 10k in either track nor cross country, our wrestling team had one practice that had a 8.5 mile run tucked three quarters of the way through).

tl;dr
Running=most calories burned in an easily quantifiable event.
Football/boxing/martial arts=high impact, taxing in different ways than running.
Wrestling practice=most taxing thing in Tao's personal experience.

Definitely gymnastics.

I wouldn't have 2 cracked vertebrae without it.

I'm going to have to go with the Hunger Games.

Competitive eating.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4BU2pOL ... re=related

Consuming over 16,000 calories in 12 minutes must be pretty taxing.