SmartPhone App's Calorie Burn Mis-Calculations

mtbiker1069

This may or may not be helpful, but wanted to share some interesting things I found with some of the phone apps I've used for fitness tracking.

I primarily ride bikes to get my calorie burn on, and I use a variety of phone apps to track mileage, calories burned, ect. (BTW, I use multiple apps since I can't find one that has everything I like, and has all my friends and family using)

I always found it interesting that what I ride to work, which is 14 miles, mostly uphill (800 feet of elevation gain) it takes me 1.5 hours, and Strava/Endomondo/MapMyRun all say I would burn about 1800 calories.

But going home, I only have one hill, then the rest is down hill. Very easy fast ride, and it only take me about 1 hour to ride home. But, my calories burned were always higher (2,000) than when I would ride to work, which is much harder.

The Apps seem to figure out the calories based on speed only and don't seem to take elevation ascent or decent into consideration when figuring out calories burned.

Well, I finally got a HR monitor and am amazed at the differences. Now with my HR Monitor it shows that I burn 1300+ going to work, and 900+ going home.

My last ride to work my calories burned based on my HR where 1642 calories less that what Endomondo reported.

My standard disclaimer that I am now posting when I post to these forums applies to this post: This is My Opinion, Does not apply for everyone, This is how it works for me, ect, ect, ect. So please don't flame me.

Just sharing in hopes it will help someone like me who was eating back half of my work out calories and not loosing as fast as I should have been. (Another disclaimer: I'm only trying to loose 2lb a week so please don't lecture me on trying to loose weight to fast)