Calories burned from strength training

newloafofbread

I'm not sure if this one has been covered before, but I'm having some trouble finding an answer for this. I've been losing weight since January and until 2-3 weeks ago I was doing cardio only. I was making calories easily on days I was eating whole foods and I was steadily losing weight. Now that I've started lifting weight, I don't add in exercise calories anymore. Everything I've heard has said that even wearing a heart rate monitor, you can't accurately measure how many calories you've burned from a strength training workout.

The problem is that I'm STARVING. Not only am I coming home from these 2 hour exhausting workouts and feeling like I need to eat my weight in protein, but my blood sugar is getting low a lot more and I'm just tired. I don't have energy. But I'm at my calories every. single. day. Realistically I know I'm using energy and burning calories doing weight lifting, I'm exerting myself and should be able to eat back those calories like I did with cardio. Is this true? And if it is, how do you figure out what you can eat back from weight lifting?

Thanks everyone

MelStren

bump.....

Sarauk2sf

What type of lifting routine are you doing? Is it 'traditional' lifting or more a circuit style routine where you heart rate is elevated for much of it?

jaxxie

Bump!!!!

barbaratrollman

Bump! This is one of the big questions I have too.

newloafofbread

What type of lifting routine are you doing? Is it 'traditional' lifting or more a circuit style routine where you heart rate is elevated for much of it?

I would have to say it's more circuit style, my heart rate is up and my rest periods are pretty brief. I do a lot of cable machines in quick succession and am supposed to be kinda jogging between the machines. At the end of plan A I do 50 squats with 20 pounds raised above my head in free weights, and I can definitely say it's up then...

I would type up the basic plan for you but I don't have it with me at the moment.

Sarauk2sf

No need to type up the plan - thank you though.

I would use MFPs settings for circuit training (although I have heard that is a euphemism around here ) and plan to eat 50 - 75% of those back to take into account inaccuracies. If you are finding your results are not as expected after a few weeks, tweak up or down as appropriate.

newloafofbread

Thank you! I will start there and we'll see what happens...

TR0berts

I don't mean to hijack, but would Sara and/or SS be interested in my writing up a conservative estimate for weight lifting Calories burned thread? I see this sort of question on the forums all the time.

It would require each individual to do a little math - or at least pop some numbers into a spreadsheet. And it would not take into account individual fitness or effort - that's why it would only be a conservative estimate. But what I have in mind would be a decent estimation, at least based upon basic physics principles.