calorie counters

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justjenny89
justjenny89 Posts: 40
in Health and Weight Loss
Does anyone know how accurate the calorie count from a LifeFitness gym machine might be? I can't currently afford a heart rate monitor, but I'd like to be as accurate as possible when I'm entering my calories burned. The university had all LifeFitness treadmills and ellipticals and what not and they will tell you "how many calories you've burned" if you enter your weight and age. They also supply a target heart rate and have heart rate sensors. I was just wondering if anyone was familiar with them.

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  • justjenny89
    justjenny89 Posts: 40
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    Does anyone know how accurate the calorie count from a LifeFitness gym machine might be? I can't currently afford a heart rate monitor, but I'd like to be as accurate as possible when I'm entering my calories burned. The university had all LifeFitness treadmills and ellipticals and what not and they will tell you "how many calories you've burned" if you enter your weight and age. They also supply a target heart rate and have heart rate sensors. I was just wondering if anyone was familiar with them.
  • timragan
    timragan Posts: 117 Member
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    I am unsure of the machines accuracy. Here is why. I do 60 minutes on the elliptical 6 days a week at and average 5.8 MPH pace. The machine says I burn 800 calories. My wristwatch monitor says I burn about 1,500 calories. The machine gets my weight as part of the exercise start up. My watch has my age, sex, current weight, and resting heart rate programmed into it. I am guessing that my real burn somewhere between the machine number and the watch number. Hope this helps a bit.
  • songbyrdsweet
    songbyrdsweet Posts: 5,691 Member
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    Machines generally have a 10-15% error. They usually use METs, but assume that everyone at a given weight burns the same calories at a given MET, which isn't the calse. Most don't subtract your BMR calories, or the calories you'd burn without exercise, either. If your BMR is 1200, you'll burn about 50 calories per hour without any activity. So if you burn 500 calories in an hour, only 450 was actually burnt through exercise. The other 50 shouldn't be counted as they are already figured into your baseline calories.
  • SGFlyinHi
    SGFlyinHi Posts: 469 Member
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    The trainers at my gym say to cut the machine totals in about half & I've found that to be accurate (at least for me), once I started wearing my HRM.

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