How long after exercise should we stop tracking calories on

whyflysouth

When I work out I use a hrm that has a "chrono" feature that tracks the heart rate during your exercise period and when you stop it you can go to "review" mode and it will give you info and calc your total calorie burn during that session.

I usually keep it tracking my heart rate for at least a half hour after I've completed my exercise because my heart rate is still above the normal resting rate I have. However, depending on how long I leave it on I can lose another 30% calories... So I still track those in MFP. Is there something wrong with that? Should I be just logging (and eating) those calories burnt at rest after exercise or should I stop the hrm, stop tracking my calories burnt once I stop the exercise?

iRun4wine

Interesting question... looking forward to hearing what others say! :flowerforyou:

tinasullens

I would stop tracking as soon as your heart rate comes down out of your target heart rate zone. Depending on the intensity of my workout, that could be immediately right after the workout is done to about 2-3 minutes afterward. Your body burns calories all day long, so technically, you could let it run all day and eat 3,000 calories. LOL! Sorry, don't mean to be a smart @$$, it's just my sense of humor. I would stop counting once your heart rate comes down from your target HR zone. But that's just me.

If you track it up to 30 min. after you complete your workout, you may be consuming too many calories based on that; and you may not lose weight, if that's your goal. If it works for you and you are still losing weight, then maybe it's ok for you to do it that way. Sorry, I know it wasn't much help.

Wolfena

I wait until my heart rate goes below 100, then I turn off my HRM and stop counting the "exercise" calories - usually only an extra 3-5 minutes or so after I'm done exercising.

Not sure what others do!

boniekatie

It depend on if it is working for you. Remember this is all about the fitness that we are trying to achive and not about the numbers. If you have been doing it that way and it has been working then don't worry about it. If you would like to see different results then try something different.

DeeDeeLHF

Personally, I stop right after. In fact, I subtract the calories I would have burned anyway. i.e. If I am on the eliptical for 30 minutes and burn 260 calories, I subtract the 60 that the HRM would have recorded if I was sitting at my computer. I figure those calories are already figured in.

DD

acakeforawife

For me it depends on what I do afterwards. If I am just hopping in the shower or flopping down on the couch, I turn it off. If I'm walking home from the gym, or running errands (sometimes I pick up groceries or whatnot at the end of my run, without going home first), then I'll leave it run till I get home. I do subtract some calories if I have it running more than an hour though, because I figure I would have burned 60 or 70 calories in that hour anyway.

Azdak

It's all just a paper and numbers game. You can write down anything you want. You can write down that you burned a hundred gazillion ultra mega calories. Your body will keep the real count.

If it is a system that makes sense to you, then by all means write it down. However, it is extremely doubtful whether using the HRM to track EPOC is adding any degree of accuracy. They aren't designed to do that. Ultimately, it is still a trial and error process.

whyflysouth

I'm thankful for all your thoughts on this!

Yeah it would be nice if everything about fitness and weight loss was just about numbers and calculations and you could just quantify it all but there's a little fuzziness to it.

I decided to experiment and keep my HRM on for the next 3 hours after the workout and I saw that on average when I'm in the car, walking short distances, normal easy stuff I tend to lose approx 100 calories per hour through the monitor so in such a case, if I'm truly at rest 30 minutes after my workout should only add an extra 50 calories to the whole thing, instead of 400.


In general I don't eat back my exercise calories, I refuse to force myself to eat to the point of being stuffed. An average sized meal for me is approximately 600 calories give or take a hundred and if it get to 800 or over I usually feel stuffed... so... I don't know it's just an observation that I'm burning much more in the 30 minutes after my workout than I am in a normal 30 minutes of being me and considering whether it makes sense to account for that in MFP.

The other thing I'm wondering is I have my hrm on me throughout a normal non-exercise day, the calculated calories should amount to my BMR+Activity Level calories for the day, right? Then I could set my MFP required calories to that minus 500 cals or whatever per day; would that be a more accurate indicator than the calculations that MFP prescribes?

ClemsonTiger

Because of the ambiguity in the numbers and calculations, there is no "right" way of doing the calculation; all you can do is accept the fact that there is error in the result and do what works for you. If you want a technical analysis of the problem, feel free to keep reading. Otherwise, you are welcome to ignore the following "mumbo jumbo" :-)

The HRM is only a HRM - it does not measure calories in any way. The "calories burned" is a result of an empirical correlation. You input your height, weight, gender, etc and the HRM then plugs that into an equation based on experimental data. That experimental data comes from people of similar physical parameters as you engaging in continuous activity while having their oxygen consumption monitored. Oxygen consuption is a direct measure of calories burned. MEANWHILE, their heart rate is monitored. A data point is only recorded when heart rate is steady, oxygen consuption is steady and the level of physical exertion is steady. Since you aren't regularly going to work out with a $10k oxygen analyzer, the HRM is programmed to correlate heart rate to oxygen consuption (calories burned) while engaging in physical activity. But that equation no longer has the physical exertion variable in it. After all, the HRM can only measure heart rate (duh) so heart rate is the only measurable variable in what is actually a very complex, dynamic mathematical problem.

An elevated heart rate caused by, say, an adrenaline rush, does not burn nearly as many calories as the same heart rate while sprinting. The beating heart itself isn't burning all the many calories. Heart rate is sort of an indicator of how much oxygen your body is consuming (physical activity) but it is physiologically MUCH more complicated than that (such as in the case of an adrenaline rush). Thus, the HRM calorie count is ONLY applicable WHILE engaging in continuous physical activity - aka the same conditions as when the real data points were taken with the oxygen analyzer. The calculated number of calories burned while sitting in a chair after your work out while your heart rate is still up is bogus, because you aren't doing physical activity anymore. It is the physical activity that burns calories throughout your body, not the elevated heart rate. The heart is still pumping hard in anticipation of more exertion. The "engineer" term is that you are not at "steady state" anymore, so you are not in the experimental sample range used to correlate heart rate to calories burned.

whyflysouth

Thanks for that Clemson! It does point out quite a large flaw in if you consider a scenario in which you bring your heart rate up high through a high intensity exercise for a short duration and then spend a much longer time during a low intensity exercise that may maintain that high heart rate but not actually produce the same calorie burn. Compare that to the same scenario but in reverse where the low intensity exercise came first only slightly increasing heart rate from resting rate and then that is followed by the high intensity one... I would assume the first sequence would show a higher calorie loss according to the hrm.