calories and heart rate

myurav

hey everyone,

so i recently got an HRM and i love it. but i'm curious about one thing. so, when i exercise, my heart rate goes between 150-165. sometimes, i take a mini break for water or pause. my heartrate remains high, so my calories burned stays high.

i guess my question is: are you still burning as many calories if your heartrate is still elevated, but you've stopped working out? is this what an afterburn is? i know that energy expended is proportional to work expended, but what if it's just your heart that's pumping while you're standing still?

just wondering!

thanks

goddesshanna

I can't believe nobody wanted to weigh in on this. I thought your question was super interesting so I did a bit of googling.

This article explains afterburn the most completely with the most amount of actual scientific references: http://www.ideafit.com/fitness-library/exercise-after-burn-0

As far as I can tell, you wouldn't be able to acurately figure out what you might be burning just by heart rate alone. You would have to find some way to measure your VO2 or liters of oxygen consumption. It is probably safe to say that you are still burning more calories by sitting there with a high heart rate than you are sitting at a resting heart rate though, but not as many calories as you would be while moving around at that heart rate. Here's a helpful chart that kind of shows what happens: http://www.iub.edu/~k536/images/exercise/epoc.jpg

0PhAtDaDdY

Higher your heart rate the more calories you are burning...The larger/heavier the person is the more calories you will burn also..

Rae6503

Higher your heart rate the more calories you are burning...

No. And this is the reason HRM don't work for strength training. It's the activity that burns the calories, not the heart rate being high. The heart rate is just a tool to estimate calories from your activity. The equation used only works during aerobic activities.

So, no you aren't still burning at the same rate during your water break. You could pause it while you break if you want to get really picky with things, or just don't worry about it since it is probably only a few calories.