Question regarding tracking calories during my gym training routines

jlazaruspa

Hi Everyone! I am new to this board. My weight training exercise routines have been based on Jeff Cavaliere (Athleanx dot com). His weight training regimes are VERY intensive and I’m sure they burn a ton of calories. Unfortunately, there’s no way that I know of whereby I can track the number of calories in one of his routines. Naturally, I am trying to watch calories in an effort to lose weight, gain muscle and become healthier. I swim, walk the treadmill and weight train about four times per week. Unfortunately, there’s no way that I know of to account for the calories burned doing these exercises, especially the one regarding Jeff Cavaliere. Does anyone have any suggestions how I can calculate how many calories I burn during one of Jeff’s workouts or while I’m swimming or while I am walking on the treadmill? Thank you in advance for your help.

tomcustombuilder

jlazaruspa wrote: »

Hi Everyone! I am new to this board. My weight training exercise routines have been based on Jeff Cavaliere (Athleanx dot com). His weight training regimes are VERY intensive and I’m sure they burn a ton of calories. Unfortunately, there’s no way that I know of whereby I can track the number of calories in one of his routines. Naturally, I am trying to watch calories in an effort to lose weight, gain muscle and become healthier. I swim, walk the treadmill and weight train about four times per week. Unfortunately, there’s no way that I know of to account for the calories burned doing these exercises, especially the one regarding Jeff Cavaliere. Does anyone have any suggestions how I can calculate how many calories I burn during one of Jeff’s workouts or while I’m swimming or while I am walking on the treadmill? Thank you in advance for your help.

You can log individual exercise activities daily the best you can and in a month review your progress or lack of it and make changes from there. I'd start by being conservative with your counting at first, figuring on the low side, as to not waste a month being too high and wasting all that time. Jeff's stuff is basic so magic to it.

AnnPT77

I don't know about the AthleanX programs specifically, but generally strength training doesn't burn huge numbers of calories, relatively speaking. You should be not too far off the mark if you log it as the appropriate type of thing in the cardiovascular part of the MFP exercise database (such as "Strength training (weight lifting, weight training)" for regular rep/set format stuff - use the total minutes including normal-length short between-set rests; or "Circuit training, general" for faster pace high rep/lower weight stuff).

I don't have an opinion about how to log swimming: There are entries for it in the database but I don't know how realistic they are. (I hate to swim, rarely do it, so haven't explored the best way to estimate it.)

For regular walking, I use estimates from https://exrx.net/Calculators/WalkRunMETs with the "energy" box set to "net". I won't belabor the specific reasoning, but I think MFP's estimates for walking are likely to be overstated. Someone who uses a treadmill regularly might have a more nuanced opinion - I only walk outdoors.

kshama2001

When I eat about 75% of my exercise calories, these entries from the MFP database are accurate for me:

1. Walking, 3.0 mph, mod. pace
2. Swimming laps, freestyle, light/moderate effort
3. Strength training (weight lifting, weight training)

"Weight training, free weights" gives considerably more calories than # 3, so if you need a more vigorous entry, there you go.

Once I had entries I trusted I could use them to reality check new entries. For example, I know how I feel after an hour of yoga or walking, and could tell that the MFP Tai Chi entry was too high for the Tai Chi classes I take. (MFP might be using a more martial arts appropriate value.) I created my own entry using 2.75 METS and https://sites.google.com/site/compendiumofphysicalactivities/home?pli=1