How long after exercise should we stop tracking calories on

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

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!

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

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.

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.