Accuracy of Shapesense.com Calorie Calculators

PippiNe
PippiNe Posts: 283 Member
in Fitness and Exercise
I also posted this in Maintenance (didn't get any replies, so thought I'd try here), so sorry if this is a repeat post for some of you.

As I moved closer to maintenance, I've tried to more accurately pinpoint the amount of calories I burn in my workouts. I purchased a $45 heart rate monitor that proved fairly useless, especially when my workout required anything in plank position or lying down (abs, etc.). I followed another post to the Shapesense website and started figuring my calorie burn on their calculators. The net burns for Plyo X and Kenpo X are fairly high (Plyo=507 and Kenpo=372), so I'm a little worried that my burns are still being overestimated. I am only calculating the burn for the active workout time (not warm-ups and cool downs).

Does anyone else use this website to determined calories burned? How accurate have you found them to be? I know an expensive HRM would probably be better, but I simply can't afford one, so I'm looking for the next best thing.

I have just started maintaining, and don't want to start gaining weight because I'm eating back exercise calories that I really haven't burned. Thanks for your insight!

Replies

  • Oh_Allie
    Oh_Allie Posts: 258 Member
    I'm not sure how accurate this calculator is. I inputted my data for a few different activities and it overestimated my burn for each activity by 50-125 calories and underestimated my burn for walking by 115 calories. I'm very confident that my HRM is accurate, so it's definitely not a site that I would use.

    Something that I've noticed while working out is that I rarely show much of a burn for any activity done while lying down, so your HRM might be working just fine.

    Hopefully someone comes along that has more advice than me. Good luck!
  • lucan07
    lucan07 Posts: 509
    I have been using the shapsense.com calculators along with my VO2max and Polar FT1 for 10 weeks now and they seem very accurate to me I also convert to net calories on same site and use that figure.

    I have set MFP to lose 2 lb per week, weighing all food accurately and doing quite a bit of cardio so tend to finish 500 calories below my MFP proposed nett calories. As a result with the 7k calories built in by MFP and the additional daily 500 calorie exercise calorie deficit I am losing 3 lb per week which is about right 3500 calorie deficit per lb loss.

    So I believe the calculations are quite accurate, I eat back as many of the calories as I feel I need refusing to eat just because I can, I never feel hungry or tired and my fitness is improving in leaps and bounds.

    For the overestimations did you convert to Nett?

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