Gadget Girl Goes to the Gym

M_from_PA

For today’s gym workout on the elliptical, I donned my various gadgets to see how the numbers compared and thought others might be interested in (amused by?) the results.

Life Fitness Elliptical:

65 minutes (60 minute workout, 5 minute cool down)

619 calories

6.52 miles

Omron Pedometer:

OK, so a pedometer is pretty useless at the gym, but it’s, otherwise, my favorite and most useful fitness gadget, so it gets a place on the list.

Number of steps: 8,315

Calories: 303

Of course, it doesn’t track heart rate or measure intensity, so the calorie estimate is fairly low. Works great, however, for walking and just being more active.

Polar FT4 Heart Rate Monitor:

Calories: 732

Average heart rate: 162

Jawbone Up Fitness Band:

Number of steps: 8,723 (usually tracks lower than the pedometer, but not this time)

Calories: 937 (When you log your workout, you also log the intensity. I chose “difficult.” Maybe its definition of difficult is different from mine.)

Before I logged the time as a workout, it estimated that I had burned 440 calories during that 65 minutes.

The “truth” is likely the average of the two numbers: 688.5.

MFP Estimate:

734 calories

I usually think the MFP estimate is very high, but it’s just two calories off from the heart rate monitor.

What I Logged and Why:

I do these kinds of calculations just for my amusement, and I tend to estimate my exercise calories low. I logged this workout as 650 calories. But some days I would have logged it as 600. I tend to log low because I eat out a lot and don’t know about estimating restaurant calories. (I eat at places that don’t have nutrition information online, and I certainly don’t bring my food scale—yet another gadget—with me.)

Other numbers:

5’ 6”
165 pounds (Maybe less? The scale—not my favorite gadget—and I are “on a break.”)
41 years old

Have others done similar comparisons? Usually, I just compare the heart-rate monitor results to the elliptical machine results (one always estimates higher than the other, but it’s never consistent; both measure heart rate). The most expensive gadget, by far, (Jawbone Up) seems to be the least accurate.