THE POLAR HRM VS. THE MACHINE (AND MFP) CALORIE COUNTERS

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  • harric88
    harric88 Posts: 82 Member
    I have a polar - I ignore the gym equipment now and always go off what it says - this was my best fitness investment!!
  • dallas4u
    dallas4u Posts: 57
    Not sure where you read on a Les Mills site that CX Worx would burn 500 cals in 30 mins, here it says a much more believable figure: http://www.lesmills.com/cx30/about-cxworx.aspx

    Also find it hard to believe that any decent instructor would claim 500 cals for a class which, although very hard (and I'll have the pain tomorrow to testify) only consists of hovers, planks, the occasional lunge and squat. And those tubes, ouch! You can get your heart rate up but this isn't cardio that is going to give you that kind of calorie burn in half an hour. I wish! The most I've burned in CX Worx is 320, and that was because I had done a lot of other classes on a special charity day before doing it. Ordinarily I would probably get a figure closer to yours. All the calorie burns listed on LMI site are averages, and as other posters have said, the variables will greatly depend on exertion level and which mix the instructor uses.

    That site still says average burned calories is 230. My HRM said 110 and I was busting myself in CxWorks. I was surprised I wasn't at 200. Throughout my life, I have heard many instructors overestimate or claim a class burned 400-700 calories. The only time I have ever heard an instructor mention HRMs was in the 90s when Spinning was the new craze.
  • Azdak
    Azdak Posts: 8,281 Member
    Well I am the complete opposite. It seems that my Polar FT7 is really high. I would love to trust it but it is so much higher than the machines. I understand the machine doesn't use the same algorithm but still concerned. This is what I get:

    Stationary bike-18miles, 60 mins, 813 calories (average HR=150)
    Treadmill 5 miles 60 mins, 1015 calories (average HR=168)
    Treadmill 10k 78 mins, 1336 calories

    Now I weigh 184lbs and I have actually set my FT7 to 170lbs to help decrease the calories in order to be more accurate. However, it is still hard to believe that I burn that much. Anyone else think my numbers are high? Or having problems as well?

    At your weight, if you are running the 5 miles in 60 mins, your actual calorie burn is about 700 calories per hour.

    There are several possible reasons for the elevated calorie count. One: sometimes people enter their weight incorrectly, or they use english numbers on a metric scale. Two: your actual max heart rate is much higher than what is calculated in the HRM. That 168 heart rate is 90% of your age-predicted HR max. Since you did that for an hour, that suggests that your actual HR max is probably over 200. Three: this is rare anymore, but sometimes interference can mess with the signal (or contact issues w/the strap) and cause the HR on the display to shoot up. Chances are, you would have noticed that by now.

    If you are running on a commercial treadmill, I would use that the help calibrate your HRM. Treadmill running numbers at your speed are probably high by about 10%-15%. I would increase the HR max on your HRM and see if that doesn't bring the numbers closer.
  • mjrkearney
    mjrkearney Posts: 408 Member
    I seem to have the opposite problem as almost everybody else. Every machine I was on would give a vastly different read for calories burned so I got a Polar FT4. It rates my burn as almost twice as much as some of the machines, but at some point I realized the machines assumed that if I wasn't giving it a HR input, then my HR would gradually decrease over time. Today I ran just over two miles straight (for the first time ever), and my HR was in the red for all but the first 5 minutes and was only in the "zone" during my post-run hills. The machine put my calories burned at somewhere around 400 but my Polar read back at 615.

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