How to log HIIT?

I've been doing HIIT dance videos on youtube the past few days and i've just been logging it as dancing, general, but there's also a HIIT aerobics category, the HIIT aerobics one says it burns a lot more calories so I’m not sure what's accurate, i don't have anything to track how many calories i've burned yet so i'm just using this app.

Answers

  • ehju0901
    ehju0901 Posts: 394 Member
    There is a HIIT exercise in Apple Fitness that I use. When it syncs to MFP, it uses "circuit training, general."

    Hopefully that helps!
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 34,234 Member
    Given a choice between 2 plausible options in the MFP exercise database, pick the lower calorie one. I'm saying that as a woman who believes in eating every single exercise calorie she earns. The issue is that it's much more common to over-estimate our exercise intensity (and calorie burn) than to under-estimate it.

    HIIT in general is a problem to estimate. HIIT isn't an exercise type, it's an exercise pacing strategy. HIIT is also trendy (which isn't necessarily a criticism). A consequence of the trendiness factor, though, is that many very diverse things end up being called "HIIT" to get in on the trend.

    What you really want to do is log the exercise in MFP as the type of exercise it is (not the pacing strategy). If you're doing high intensity aerobic dance type exercise, logging it as dance makes sense. Which dance or aerobics type to choose is a judgement call, but that's where I'd personally starting thinking about picking one of the middling to low options.

    Our impulse is going to be to pick the highest plausible one, because we worked really hard, right? (Seriously. We did!) But research suggests that people usually err high when estimating exercise calories. Easy solution: Don't. ;)