Best calorie burned app

JMR010805

Since I have discovered the gym machine calories burned can't be trusted I am looking for an app that tracks accurately. Any suggestions?

AnnPT77

Nothing tracks truly accurately, including fitness trackers and heart rate monitors. It's all estimates, some methods likely to be closer for some things, different methods for others.

Cycling power meters are about as close as it gets, but that's only cycling. There are adequate methods for estimating others - close enough to be useful.

If you say what types of exercise you need to estimate, folks might have suggestions.

Personally, I use the MFP database for strength training, weight-adjusted machine estimate for Concept 2 indoor rowing, fitness tracker (one that knows what exercise I'm doing) for on-water rowing and spin class (no power meter on gym bikes). It's mostly not accurate, but close enough to work for me.

Since calorie goals are estimates, food logs are estimates, and exercise is estimates, practical results are what matter.

sijomial

Accuracy is nice but rarely achievable - but in reality "reasonable" is good enough for purpose.

It's worth remembering that not all machines and exercises present the same issues of being unreasonable or significantly exaggerated so worth understanding how the particular exercise estimate you are getting is being calculated.

Also is the estimate a gross calorie estimate or net calories estimate? Not that significant for short duration exercise but becomes an issue especially for long duration, low intensity exercise (walking for example).

My personal exercise selection:
Indoor and outdoor cycling - I use power meters which give very accurate net cal estimates. But in the past I've used Strava and Garmin (with HRM) estimates which were perfectly reasonable when averaged out over hundreds of hours and thousands of miles.
Strength training - I use the estimate in the database here. It's a pretty modest/conservative estimate for my training.
Circuit training - I use the estimate in the database but modify it downwards as it simply "feels" too generous.
Walking - I use a mathematical formula for net cals based on bodyweight and distance.

Personally when I used a HRM for cardio the results were mixed: pretty reasonable for moderate intensity steady state cardio, under-estimating for long duration low intensity exercise, badly over-estimating for high interisity interval training.

jhanleybrown

I'm looking for best for swimming if anyone has one.

cwolfman13

JMR010805 wrote: »

Since I have discovered the gym machine calories burned can't be trusted I am looking for an app that tracks accurately. Any suggestions?

It's all an estimate. I don't use indoor cardio equipment often, but I find their estimates to be good enough and the one's I've used, use METS...some stationary bikes I've used also use watts which is pretty accurate if everything is calibrated correctly.

Bari_Tone

jhanleybrown wrote: »

I'm looking for best for swimming if anyone has one.

I am quite happy with my Apple Watch for swimming. It counts laps well, tracks speed, all kinds of stuff that I don't care about too. It also works well with cycling and spin class. I used "functional training" when I am working on the farm (hard work only - hand planting, cutting wood, clearing brush) and I think the calorie burn results are reasonable. The downside with an Apple Watch is there is not auto-pause/auto-start. But so what...if you are counting calories burned and you take breaks, the count will still be right(ish) but your calories burned per hour will be less and your exercise time will be longer.

I also agree with @sijomial about accuracy. I mean it doesn't have to be that precise. Work out hard and app or no app, you will know it. I have used an HRM, equations (Livestrong has a bunch of them - BeachBody does too), tracking apps, etc. At the end of this list I still stand by my apple watch...or a Garmin...or a fitbit.

Cheers!

Kotuliak

jhanleybrown wrote: »

I'm looking for best for swimming if anyone has one.

Here is one - http://www.swimmingcalculator.com/swim_log_grid.php . It clocks me at 15 calories per minute. I think it's a bit high, I log it at 12 calories per minute.

jhanleybrown

Kotuliak wrote: »

jhanleybrown wrote: »

I'm looking for best for swimming if anyone has one.

Here is one - http://www.swimmingcalculator.com/swim_log_grid.php . It clocks me at 15 calories per minute. I think it's a bit high, I log it at 12 calories per minute.

Thank you. That's the one I've used in the past. It will give me 750 cals for swimming 2,500 freestyle which seems really high. I mark it down to 500. Basically I assume 100 kcals/500 yards. I think I'm ok if that's conservative but want to find other estimates to make sure it's not still high.

P,S, this is the last exercise I do where I dont have confidence in the estimate.