Calorie accuracy

mathiar86

I play soccer three times a week. At training. I wear my Fitbit Charge HR and let it auto detect the activity. After about a 90min training session it has recorded my HR and given me a calorie reading, usually between the 650-700 range since I'm in fat burning the whole time and hit cardio and peak sporadically.

I play social badminton once a week. Usually I get three games, each about 20min but Fitbit is hit and miss with auto detecting these. Sometimes it'll detect the three separate activities, usually about 15-18min games and give me calories based on HR etc. I've noticed games that I've worked a lot harder my HR will be higher and I'll get more calories.

Today however it didn't recognize anything. It said I only did 11 active minutes even though I'd played 3 games and worked in all, was pretty sweaty and could feel my heart pounding after each. When I noticed it hadn't detected I manually logged based on the time I was there and it gave me 800 calories.

There's no way I burned more in one hour of social badminton than in 90min of competitive soccer. What's going on??

heybales

Inaccurate HR readings.

Instead of comparing the calories - which is merely the end result of calculations from the HR seen - give the values for avgHR and maxHR seen for how long?

And are you new to using the Charge HR?
Because it improves accuracy of calorie burn the first couple weeks while it's trying to estimate your fitness level - the prior values could have been wrong.

Oh, don't count sweating as indicator of intensity level, it's terrible.
Pounding heart can be good (if Charge HR sees it accurately), but if breathing isn't increased along with it, it's anaerobic and recovery reasons for pounding.

And yes, I'd start manually the activity for the game since it could start out slow or have slow sections.

mathiar86

No I've had it for about two months now. My soccer sessions are pretty consistent, always in the 6-700 range. Manually adding badminton gives me a huge calorie estimate compared to when it has auto detected my movement in the past as three separate games. I'm not only counting sweat but also how tired I feel, how fast my HR is going. I'm not an elite athlete but a fit enough soccer player to know that I'm working significantly harder in training with much fewer breaks for shorter times than I am in badminton which often has a 10min break between games where I'm sitting doing nothing.

MzManiak

Sweat will keep it from accurately reading your heart rate. If you aren't already, try wearing it a bit more loosely (so it easily moves up and down your arm) and drying it between sets, and see if that helps. Manually entering the exercise will calculate an average burn from their database and isn't as accurate. Also, Fitbit will only log activities that are more than 15 minutes, so if you only have an elevated heart rate for 11 minutes, it may not log that activity (but should still give you an increase in calories burned).

heybales

Curious for a session where you went back into Fitbit and made an Activity record of the whole badminton session.
What was the avgHR for that time - and how long?

For the soccer game where it made a correct Activity record for time - what was the avgHR for that?