Physical Therapy

joydyanne23

I wish there was a way to track/measure what I am doing in PT so that I could see how man, if any, calories it burned.

patriciafoley1

a fitness tracker, like fitbit, or any of the other many brands, keeps track of calories burned and many of them can be synced to automatically update the results to myfitnesspal.

yirara

There are some entries for strength training, yoga, interval training etc under Cardio. I don't know what kind of physio you do, but if it includes explanations and someone showing you what to do then you probably burn very few calories.

AnnPT77

I wear a fitness tracker routinely, and have done so through several bouts of physical therapy.

Something like the arm bike warmup I did at the start of shoulder PT sessions would burn a moderate amount of calories per minute, but since it was usually only 3-4 minutes, that didn't add up to much.

The other stuff, looked at as a total, didn't add up to meaningfully more calories than I'd burn doing routine daily movement like making dinner or vacuuming the living room.

I do count calories, do add exercise calories, don't sync my tracker to MFP, but haven't bothered adding PT calories as exercise. Too trivial to worry about.

I think there are long-term benefits to the "add exercise calories separately" approach for those whose lifestyle it suits, but our MFP activity level - even when set at sedentary - adds calories to our goal to cover routine daily levels of movement. Adding every little low burn thing we do can easily veer into double counting those activity calories.

Wearing a tracker can offer insights about what burns meaningful calories and what doesn't, and for most people syncing the tracker to MFP can be a good strategy, as long as they wear it near 24x7 and turn negative adjustments on in MFP.

If your PT is much more vigorous than any of mine has been, YMMV.

REAPERBANSHEE

Hope you found something that works!