Strava for better calorie estimation

slickracer

I have been using a free membership at Strava to log my bike rides and have found it does a much better estimation of calorie burn than using just my GPS or estimated calories. The site tries to calculate your power in watts from your weight, your bike weight, and the gps track you upload (hills, flats, etc). The power it calculates directly translates into calories burned based on your actual ride and not some generic table that says the average person on an average bike on an average course will burn X.

They have a running feature as well but I have not used that yet.

tegeos

Is the site compatible with Garmin HRM?

slickracer

Not sure about the Garmin HRM's without GPS but I use a Garmin 705 GPS/HRM and it works great.

It also lets you define segments of a ride and you can see how you compare against all the other people who rode the same segment. Pretty motivating when you want to place for a hill climb or similar.

The downside to using them is the calorie count is too real. Generally my GPS says I burned almost twice as many calories as Strava does. Of course when one says 1400 and the other says 800 calories burned it doesn't really make much difference as I never eat that much over.