Should I log strength exercise

andreamariexoxo

I work out for weight loss, not muscle building. But when I go to the gym I do both cardio and strength training to replace some of my fat weight with muscle weight, as well as to prevent loose skin and improve my overall fitness. I only log my cardio exercise to keep up with calorie counts. So should I even bother logging my strength exercises?

Stockholm_Andy

If you log strength training under the cardio section it will give you an estimation of the calories you burned if that's important to you. (I'd be careful of eating them back though as it may over estimate what you burned depending on the intensity of what you did.)

I personally log weight, reps, etc in another app called JEFIT because it's important to me. However, if I were in your shoes I probably wouldn't.

VUA21

I wouldn't. MFP does not take into consideration the weight, speed, or reps. Basically it'll give you the same caloric burn for 30 minuets of doing 200kg squats as 2kg curls, even though they are not even close to the same energy required.

sijomial

Lets assume a snack you eat has 200 cals.
Lets assume the MFP generic strength training estimate gives you 200 cals/hr for strength training.


Why if you are estimating net calories (which is how this site is designed to be used) would you log the calories in but not the calories out?

smolmaus

I think that's a personal judgement call. I know I'm burning more than 140kcal an hour doing fairly heavy lifts (heavy for me anyway lol) from judging how tired/ hungry I am later say in comparison to a quick 20 min run that I would get the same calories for. So I know the MFP estimate is conservative for what I'm doing and I'm safe enough to eat them back if I need them. If it's fairly light weights you're using or low volume it might be less of a conservative estimate for you and if you don't think you need the extra calories for recovery then I maybe wouldn't bother.

kami3006

I always have. While it doesn't burn a lot of calories, adding them certainly made a difference to my workouts. As with all calorie estimators, start conservatively, and then reassess after 4 to 6 weeks and adjust your calories accordingly. After several years of following mainly powerlifting programs, I still only burn around 150 calories per hour.

kpsyche

kami3006 wrote: »

I always have. While it doesn't burn a lot of calories, adding them certainly made a difference to my workouts. As with all calorie estimators, start conservatively, and then reassess after 4 to 6 weeks and adjust your calories accordingly. After several years of following mainly powerlifting programs, I still only burn around 150 calories per hour.

150 kcal an hour (2.5kcal/min aka 10.45kJ/min) is probably reasonable. In fact this paper estimates 10-12kJ/min so it's right in the ballpark: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3942638/

I log all my weight training as 10kJ/min because I don't want to overestimate but at the same time I want to eat a bit of my energy expenditure to, hopefully, minimise muscle loss while in a deficit.

Bry_Fitness70

My fitness tracker with an HRM usually measures between 3-4 calories per minute. The "strength training" entry on MFP is 3.87 calories per minute, so it seems reasonable to use that if you don't use HR data.

(Before I get the inevitable "you can only use HR data to calculate calories burned for steady-state" exercises, the similarity in calorie burn calculations over hundreds of measurements correlates reasonably with general calorie burn tables (as stated above), so I find using my HRM data it preferable to using general tables that don't take my demographics and effort into account)