A good App for counting calories when using a Heart Rate Monitor

oldmandee

Can anyone recommend an App that calculates calorie burn that uses your HRM data for more accuracy? I am finding that the apps I have tried, like MapMyFitness are only using static calories per minute and do not factor in the intensity.

pamperedlinny

I've been using Fitbit for over 15 years. Back when it was just a clip on I would wear a heart rate monitor to workout and manually adjust. Since they started making watches that include heart rate it's much more accurate for tracking exercise intensity.

AnnPT77

Using your heart rate won't necessarily be more accurate. It's better for some exercises, worse for others. It's kind of never better than least bad, because estimating exercise calories is more complicated than it seems.

As background, heart rate is a rather poor metric for interval training (especially intense intervals, especially if relatively new to intense exercise) and pretty terrible for strength exercise. It's not great, either, for long, slow exercise, like a very long casual walk.

In intervals, heart rate lags the intensity, doesn't drop instantly when the easy phase between intervals begins, so calories can be overstated. They're probably relatively best at moderate steady state exercise, during which oxygen consumption (the thing that actually correlates with heart rate) is more steady. Even then, heart rate drifts upward with constant steady-state intensity during longer-duration exercise, which doesn't mean one is burning more calories later in the workout.

For strength exercise, heart rate can increase because of strain, essentially, not because of oxygen consumption, so the HRM can be quite misleading.

What I'd suggest is this:

* For strength training, use the MFP exercise database estimating method. Use the "Strength training (weight lifting, weight training" entry in the Cardiovascular section for normal rep/set style strength workouts. Use one of the "Circuit training" or "calisthenics" entries there for higher-rep lower-weight circuits, or for so-called HIIT that's bodyweight or circuit-like.

* For walking or running, use this calculator, with the energy box set to "net":

https://exrx.net/Calculators/WalkRunMETs

* For an exercise machine that gives you an average watts figure, you may be able to use its calorie estimate, if it knows your demographic data (sex, age, weight) in a case where moving your bodyweight is a key part of the exercise. Most of these will give you gross calories (includes calories MFP's already accounted for), so maybe subtract your BMR (or better, BMR + MFP daily-life activity calories) for that time period, if it's a lengthy workout.

For other cardiovascular activities, you might be happier with a fitness tracker device that lets you tell the device what exercise you're doing. I don't know of any calculators that do the estimation you're asking for, though they may exist. I've never researched that because I use my Garmin as the least bad option for this sort of thing.

The easiest option is to get a fitness tracker that syncs to MFP, test its all-day calorie adjustments for 4-6 weeks, and see if it's accurate for you overall. For most people, it's likely to be fairly close, but no guarantees.

This may all seem kind of complicated and doom-y, but it really isn't. While exercise estimates aren't going to be exact, you can get close enough for them to be useful, in most cases. Not worth obsessing about.

Just my opinions, throughout, though.

yirara

Adding to what AnnP said, using heartrate as an approximation during steady-state cardio only works if you really know your maximum heartrate and your training zones are set correctly. Hint: in about 30% of all people it's very far from 220-age. Your heartrate also is influenced by temperature, hormonal cycle in women, if you happen to by hypothyroid and your meds are not spot-on you might get very varied results. Use an asthma inhaler and you might end up with a higher heartrate. None of this increases or decreases calorie burn despite an influence on heartrate.

I have over 8 years of calorie and weight loss/maintenance data here and can say with confidence that for me, the Garmin algorythm for running is fairly good, it's greatly exaggerated for walking (gives me nearly the same calories per same distance as running despite substantially lower HR!), and it probably underestimates a fair bit for cycling. For fitbit, running calories are exaggerated, walking is still total and utter tosh, and I'm not sure about cycling. But that's for me. Other people might experience something else.

AnnPT77

yirara wrote: »

Adding to what AnnP said, using heartrate as an approximation during steady-state cardio only works if you really know your maximum heartrate and your training zones are set correctly. Hint: in about 30% of all people it's very far from 220-age. Your heartrate also is influenced by temperature, hormonal cycle in women, if you happen to by hypothyroid and your meds are not spot-on you might get very varied results. Use an asthma inhaler and you might end up with a higher heartrate. None of this increases or decreases calorie burn despite an influence on heartrate.

I have over 8 years of calorie and weight loss/maintenance data here and can say with confidence that for me, the Garmin algorythm for running is fairly good, it's greatly exaggerated for walking (gives me nearly the same calories per same distance as running despite substantially lower HR!), and it probably underestimates a fair bit for cycling. For fitbit, running calories are exaggerated, walking is still total and utter tosh, and I'm not sure about cycling. But that's for me. Other people might experience something else.

I'd underscore, though, that for a lot of us, these estimates will be close enough to be useful. It's just math: Let's say I'm off by 50-100% on a half-hour workout, which is probably more extreme than realistic. I burned 250 calories, think I burned 500 . . . or I burned 500, think it's 250. Either error is just a bit over 10% of my TDEE. Over time, as I monitor results, I'll figure out that exercise estimates are off somewhere . . . or I'll adjust my base calories up or down by 10%. (Realistically, it's unlikely to be off by that high a factor.)

Odds are decent that some exercise estimates will be over, others under, and it'll come out OK overall. Think of it as being the "law of medium numbers". (That's a statistics nerd joke, but if you look up the law of large numbers, you'll see what I'm getting at.)

It's close enough. Don't stress.

Some people will tell you it's more accurate to use a TDEE calculator, which averages in your planned (not necessarily performed) exercise, without even knowing the exercise type or duration (usually). Yeah, that'll be more accurate. 🤣 (But a TDEE calculator can work OK, too, especially if your exercise schedule is consistent.)

Either way, close enough for gubmint work.

The key is to watch your results over time, and adjust as needed. Everything in this process is an estimate, not a measurement - daily life calorie needs, exercise calorie burn, logged food, BMR, fitness tracker data, the whole nine yards - but that's OK. It's not precise, but it's workable. Monitor and adjust.