Calorie Burning

clorentzen

I recently purchased a watch that provides heart rate, heart recovery, calories burned from exercise and so on. I used it for the first time last week and found that during one of my workouts, I burned almost a 1,000 calories. When I started thinking about the 1,000 calories I just burned during my work out it made me wonder if in fact that was the case.

Your body burns calories all day. When you are using something to monitor calories burned during exercise, are you supposed to consider what your body would have burned if it was at rest? For example, if I burn 100 calories an hour at rest and I burn 1,000 and hour during exercise, should I be reporting 900 calories as my total expended during exercise or 1,000 ?

Am I way over thinking this?

Flyntiggr

Some people subtract out the calories you would have burned just sitting around. I am just not interested in the hassle of that, and just don't eat back all of my exercise calories on most days to compensate.

skinnyjeans13

I thought about that too, but I just can't be bothered to add ANOTHER level of concern onto this whole process... I've been aiming to get my net calories as close to 1200 as possible every day and it's been working so I'm not going to over-complicate it at this point.

amylynn9

Hm that's a good question. I've always understood it to be additional. I don't get caught up in that though. I log my workouts on here and consider my BMR as a plus! Good luck!

hroderick

I subtract out my BMR.
You can measure the burn while watching TV for an hour and subtract that from the burn while exercising.
This is especially important to do if you eat all your exercise calories

helenium

I subtract out my maintenance calories (since the alternative to an hour of exercise is doing daily things, not lying in bed for an hour - which would mean BMR). I don't want to overestimate my calories after all.