P90X, calculation for calories burned using avg heart rate

maurilax

By the third week of doing P90X and using this site to track my calories I was already frustrated at not being able to accurately account for calories burned per exercise session. I went out and bought a pretty cheap yet effective heart rate monitor that gives the avg heart rate over time (Polar FT1). I also googled 'Calories and Power as a Function of Heart Rate' and have been using the first site in the results as my calculator to find calories burned per workout. I have compared my numbers to what is posted on the beachbody forums for each workout and everything seems to be somewhat similar. Usually on the Cardio workouts i will burn between 450-600 calories in about 45 mins, a little bit more for the plyo workout. (I usually round down to the nearest hundred for my MFP entries)

Recently I have read some posts on this site about the inaccuracies of gym equipment for monitoring calories burned, but i wanted to make sure at the very least that i wasn't extremely over estimating my calories burned.

Also I was wondering if anyone had any experience with VO2max testing, and how useful the information is and how to go about obtaining it.

Lastly, I usually don't start tracking my Heart Rate until the stretching portion of the P90X DVD has ended so that my average heart rate has less variance.

Any information or links would be helpful. my results thus far are very good so I am more curious than concerned.

Thanks,

maurilax

This is the actual link to the calculator, I'm pretty sure i saw it posted somewhere else on this board too.

http://www.braydenwm.com/calburn.htm

maurilax

so since no one responded and i was still curious I kept doing some more research and came across this blog post, linked by another mfp member.

I think it answers my question pretty well So I will post it here in case anyone else needs to find the information.

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/blog/Azdak/view/the-real-facts-about-hrms-and-calories-what-you-need-to-know-before-purchasing-an-hrm-or-using-one-21472

also I found this post about bodybugg which was very interesting. especially the comments

http://opensourcediet.com/29/a-disappointing-day-of-cycling-with-the-bodybugg/