Fitbit Charge HR calorie burns

beatua1

I have been using my fitbit charge HR for about 30 days. I have my MFP activity set to sedentary (I am fairly sedentary in my job), but I walk about 12k steps daily and do high intensity cardio most days and resistance train 3 days a week.

My sedentary calorie burn is about 2600, and my fitbit pretty regularly puts me between 3300 and 3700 calories. I have been eating to about 200-300 below my fitbit burn minus my deficit every day as a margin of safety, and it has been going well.

Anyway, I wanted to see how others treat their fitbit calorie burns.

heybales

Suggest you manually log the resistance training as HR-based is going to cause inflated calorie burn. do it on Fitbit.
Weights if doing sets and rests of 2-4 min.
Circuit training if rests up to 1 min and reps 15-20.
Calisthenics if rests below 1 min and reps really high, perhaps using just body weight.

Now - if that is mere 15-20 min resistance training with light weights and easy for you - then the difference between inflated and better estimate isn't that big a deal. You also aren't getting much of a workout out of it either.

But if that's 1 hr and your HR really gets high on the hard parts - then it's badly inflated.

So you have been making your deficit even bigger with workouts that cause you to burn that much daily, because even though inflated probably, that's still high?
Not really a good idea if you want the workout to really amount to the effort you put in to it.
No better way to waste a workout and start making the next ones worse and worse than creating too big a deficit.

editorgrrl

beatua1 wrote: »

I have been eating to about 200-300 below my fitbit burn minus my deficit every day as a margin of safety, and it has been going well.

Anyway, I wanted to see how others treat their fitbit calorie burns.

Just wanted to be sure you understand that if (and only if) you enable negative calorie adjustments in your diary settings, eating back 100% of your Fitbit adjustments means you're eating TDEE minus deficit.

Your deficit is already built into your default MFP calorie goal, so you should be leaving 200–300 calories' wiggle room, not that plus a deficit.

That said, I've been at least 100 calories over goal every day in maintenance, yet lost another 10 lbs. in the past year. We should all be looking for the maximum number of calories at which we lose or maintain—never the minimum.

beatua1

heybales, thanks for that feedback, I will start logging my resistance training manually. So I just need to enter the time frame in mfp and it will overwrite fitbit's calorie burn during that time? My resistance training is typically about 45 minutes SL 5x5 and my heart rate in fitbit is usually oscillating between 95-115 for the majority of my working time (i.e. after warm up).

editorgrrl, I think I have not described this well enough. Here are the details:

my sedentary TDEE is ~2600 my goal in mfp is ~1600 (obviously I am currently set to lose 2lb/week). I have set fitbit to enable negative calorie adjustments. Typically depending on activity my fitbit will have me at 3300-3700 calories burned and I have been typically eating between 2100-2500 calories to leave my deficit at about 1000 calories, assuming fitbit is over crediting me some calories burned, or to leave a little wiggle room. I am certainly not looking for the minimum calories at which I lose, nor am I looking for the maximum. I think given my current body composition (6'2" and 250 lbs) that I can go a little faster than the maximum calories to lose weight and still be safe. But I am interested in further feedback as to whether that seems reasonable.

In fact here is my current plan (obviously not a strict reliance on this):
Eat at 1000 calorie deficit from 250-240
Eat at 750 calorie deficit from 240-225
Eat at 500 calorie deficit from 225-212
Eat at 250 calorie deficit from 212-200

Thanks!

heybales

That's as high as your HR gets with SL5x5?

That's not very high for supposedly doing an anaerobic exercise like lifting.
Are you pretty new to it and so still building up the weight and right now it feels easy to lift what you are doing?

Because if you've been doing it awhile, and it feels hard - but that's as high as your HR goes - then it only feels hard probably because you are unrecovered or fatigued - not because it was an actual workout that was hard on the muscles.

Reason for being unrecovered with only 3x weekly would be too big a deficit. Diet affects recovery already, bigger makes it worse.
Unrecovered leads to workouts that are not really hard on the body to where it needs to improve.

Correct on manually logged (or synced in) workouts will overwrite Fitbit's calorie burn stats. The activity record as a snapshot stays the same - the actual data shown in daily stats is updated.

Fitbit isn't inflating calorie burn BTW - it'll be underestimating.
Because it assigns sleeping level calorie burn to all non-moving time, even when awake and burning more, or standing not moving burning even more again. And the 10% of calories eaten used to digest/process food.

Suggest not making a big deficit even bigger when attempting to have good workouts. Because 200-300 or more is big, 25% of current deficit already.

beatua1

Thanks heybales.

SL 5x5 is still pretty easy I have started recently. Squats, dead and bench are all pretty easy still. Row and Press are already getting tough. I have not yet failed a rep on any of the exercises and have been increasing all along the way. In general I do not feel unrecovered nor tired or groggy with my current eating.

I actually added two additional exercises to the SL 5x5 program from the ICF 5x5 program. I do resisted crunch 3x10 and cable pull through 2x10 on alternating days as well, so I am doing 4 exercises per day.

current weights:
Squat = 160
dead = 165
bench = 155
row = 110
press = 105

I think I will manually log my strength training for now and try to eat right on my goal calories in MFP and see how my weight responds. The other complicating factor is a started taking creatine in the last week, so I'm not sure how much water weight I am likely to gain from that (I read .5-1% body weight), so I will probably give it 30 days to level off and see where my weight is at that point.

Thanks again for your feedback.

P.S. I have had a lot of problems with the HR being accurate. Often times during cardio (especially when I am moving my arms a lot) I have to hold my arm still to get it to read correctly (which of course I do rarely or it impacts the effectiveness of my cardio. I have read the FAQ on heartrate on the fitbit site and read a lot of other material on it, but it seems to only register a good value when I am very still ( I have tried it tight, loose, at 1 finger above the wrist bone, and 3 fingers above, left and right arm, ...). So it is possible what I see in the fitbit app during that time is not very accurate. When I do cardio that is not very arm movement intensive it is usually pretty good. But even vigorous walking seems to throw it off unless I hold my arm still. But my resting heart rate seems very accurate all of the time (I usually spot check by manually measuring my heart rate).

edit: I just looked back at some of my older SL workouts, and I think my HR monitor must have been off the day I quoted the 95-110. This is the graph from my workout last Friday:

heybales

There we go, that's a better reading of a good workout.

And indeed, if it's having trouble with cardio and arm in certain positions, you could easily be having dropouts from time to time lifting, but you got some nice fast spikes there too.
I'm guessing those were lower body lifts with the 2 biggest jumps near start and near end. That's what you like to see.
And very true as starting out and nailing form with lighter weight, it shouldn't be as hard yet.

So good call.

Oh, you can see from that chart why it's inflated HR and calorie burn in lifting.
Look at long it takes for the HR to slowly drop back down, and you were probably standing or sitting at that point, so the required HR for standing is probably the 75 - which isn't seen again after you've gotten started.
Also, the increased HR for anaerobic isn't about the need for oxygen to burn the fuel being used as it is in cardio, fat/carb mix. Those lifts is carb only and no oxygen needed.