Strength training calories

halimaiqbal00

I wear a hrm which tells me I burn 600 calories during my hour of lifting heavy. Compound movements with a few isolation moves. Dying my 'rest periods' I jog on the spot to keep heart rate elevated. I've been told hrm is inaccurate because it only takes into account steady state cardio. If I log it in mfp, it tells me I've burnt around 150 calories. There's a big discrepancy between both numbers so what do I go with? I've set mfp calorie goal as sedentary and then eat back exercise calories so I need to know how many to consume back.

diannethegeek

An HRM is inaccurate for anything but steade-state cardio. Since lifting is not steady-state cardio, the HRM numbers are not accurate. Don't use them.

sijomial

HRM is completely unsuitable for strength training calories estimates as strength training isn't aerobic exercise.
Just go by the MFP (very) rough approximation of something that's impossible to measure.

As long are you are consistent it's fine. If your weight trend doesn't work out as expected over an extended period of time adjust your base calories.

Spliner1969

halimaiqbal00 wrote: »

I wear a hrm which tells me I burn 600 calories during my hour of lifting heavy. Compound movements with a few isolation moves. Dying my 'rest periods' I jog on the spot to keep heart rate elevated. I've been told hrm is inaccurate because it only takes into account steady state cardio. If I log it in mfp, it tells me I've burnt around 150 calories. There's a big discrepancy between both numbers so what do I go with? I've set mfp calorie goal as sedentary and then eat back exercise calories so I need to know how many to consume back.

I will do cross training (I don't lift heavy) with mixed body weight training, walking/jogging/etc. and use an HRM to estimate my calories. I do my best to keep my HR above 120 and it seems accurate to me. Everyone says no, but I eat the calories back and don't gain weight, so for me, it's accurate. So if you're trying to maintain, eat back what you feel is accurate and see if your weight changes over the period of a few weeks in the direction you thought. If it doesn't something's off. That's why you see some people say "eat back only 50% of your exercise calories starting off". They are figuring in inaccuracies. It'll take time, but if you stick with the same device/app/HR monitor and watch your trends you can dial it in and use your device like you want. I can easily trust mine up to say 90-95%, but that's ME. For someone else it might be different. If you find it to be woefully inaccurate, then you could try using an app/HR monitor which you can pause during rest sessions, but honestly if it were me, and you're jogging in place or doing something to keep you HR up in the aerobic range, then I'd say you can trust it more than you think. Again, my opinion only.

quiksylver296

I'd go with the smaller number, personally.

leooftheyear

my fitbit charge HR usually gives me somewhere between 300-400 cal for a 70 minute session. Honestly, are you losing weight the way you want to with using the 600 cal burn?

kami3006

I log 100 calories for an hour of power lifting and eat them all. I lost at the rate I wanted and maintain on it so it's pretty close. I don't run between sets though as the lack of rest would affect my progress.

ETA... FWIW I am 5'3" and 123 lbs.

ETA: Start with the 150, eat that back and then reevaluate after a couple weeks. Adjust accordingly. It's really the only way to find the right number.

coachmer_

you posted a thread about counting macros so i will assume that is what you're doing - if you are, the calorie burn is (or at least should be - depending how you derived your macros) already built into your calories and macros so this won't matter much.

leooftheyear

leooftheyear wrote: »

my fitbit charge HR usually gives me somewhere between 300-400 cal for a 70 minute session. Honestly, are you losing weight the way you want to with using the 600 cal burn?

I'm retracting/editing this... the 300-400 calories is what I burn for the entire hour, so it's really only giving me an additional 150-200 calories, so the 150 from MFP is right.