How to figure calorie burn?

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tollers01
tollers01 Posts: 3 Member
in Fitness and Exercise
Hi!

A little background, and then the question. I'm the incident photographer for my local volunteer fire department, and incidents can be anything from a short time at an accident scene to hours at a fire. It's the latter category that I'm really wondering about. It's more active than a slow walk, but not really a brisk walk (though with occasional bursts of "Oh, crap, I need to be over _there_ if I'm gonna get the good shots"), and then factor in that I'm frequently wearing turnout gear (coat/pants/boots), occasionally wearing the helmet, and almost always using the capacious pockets of the turnout gear to carry all the camera gear.

How do I begin to figure out how many calories I'm burning? Tonight, for instance, we did a controlled burn of two large fields. I was out there for three hours, did a lot of walking, only sat down once for about 10 minutes, and spent so much time lifting the camera (with the additional weight of the heavy coat on my arms) that my arms and shoulders feel like I gave them a good strength workout (ouch).

I have no idea where to start. I've just been using the slow walking entry and my total time, but I expect that's underreporting what I'm actually doing.

Any suggestions?

Replies

  • StephGettinFit
    StephGettinFit Posts: 43 Member
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    Put on a heart rate monitor (I love my polar ft4) or a bodymedia
  • karlalband
    karlalband Posts: 196 Member
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    Get some kind of HRM or a Pedometer. I just purchased a Fitbit - because I couldn't get thing figured out. Have the Fitbit now for almost 3 weeks and it tracking progress is rather interesting. Good luck, add me as friend so you can see what my progress will be.
  • 3dogsrunning
    3dogsrunning Posts: 27,167 Member
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    I would chalk it up as a bonus burn and not log it. It doesn't happen on the regular and it varies in intensity. Honestly the extra burn wouldn't be huge.
    I have a job where on some days I have similar experience. I don't log it. There are days when I am less active and it evens out.

    ETA - a HRM would not be accurate for this type of activity.
  • tollers01
    tollers01 Posts: 3 Member
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    I wasn't clear enough in my question. 3dogsrunning, this is outside my day job, so I've based my normal base burn on the regular dayjob and its average level of activity. The fire department is volunteer and on top of my regular job, so in a way it _is_ my exercise on days when we have big incidents, because if I spend eight hours at work and then go spend three hours photographing a fire, I'm probably not going to also work out. :-) (I couldn't have worked out last night if I'd wanted to... I was exhausted by the time I got home!)

    I guess my question comes up because I was looking in the exercise database to try to find something that might be roughly equivalent, and there was an entry for standing on a bank and fishing that supposedly burns more calories per hour than walking. That makes no sense to me, so do people just pick those numbers out of thin air or what?

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