Calories burnt during exercise

wazert

I exercise with an HRM that gives me an estimate of how many calories I've burnt. Now, if I run 1h and burn 600 calories, should I subtract the calories I would have burnt doing nothing special? Like, if I had watch TV for an hour I would still have burnt some calories. Right now I'm subtracting about a 100 calories per hour. What do you guys do?

shadowofender

Nah don't worry about subtracting anything, you're overthinking it.

What I do, is only take 50-75% of the burn to account for error. Because most burns overestimate. So if your HRM says 600, since that would be more accurate than say MFP logs, I'd still count about 450 calories for a workout and log those.

cwolfman13

Just make some allowance for estimation error...a HRM is only giving you an estimate. When I did the MFP method I usually took off 20% or so for an aerobic event and more for an anaerobic event.