Calculating calories burned through yard work

I'm afraid something as general as yard work really has no simple answer to how many calories you burn. There is absolutely no way to set a standard for this. One person doing yard work could mean just riding a mower, while another is out pulling weeds the size of a small bush by hand. There is zero consistency is anything from person to person. Your best bet will just be to schedule a calorie deficit daily if you want to lose weight. Diet alone is all you need to drop fat if you can stick to a clean calorie deficit diet.

This will be tough, you can do it with a heart rate monitor though if you have one or buy one.

1. Calculate your TDEE. Take this number and divide it by 24. This number is a rough estimate of what you burn hourly throughout the day just living and doing your daily routine

2. Strap the HRM on when you do activities that you want to track. Record the amount of calories it says you burned.

3. Take the amount of calories it said you burned and subtract the number from the first step. This will give you the number of calories you expended past what you normally would without performing that activity. This will make sure you aren't over estimating your calories in a more specific way. Without this step you are double counting the calories from step 1.


Or

Just account about 70% of what the HRM says you burnt. They are not a perfect tool. Allow for some margin of error, your better off slightly under estimating than over estimating if weight loss is your goal.

Or

I take it you are trying to lose weight. Did you set up your diet on MFP to lose the amount of weight per week that you desire? On days when you do yard work you can just eat slightly over this projected deficit. Depending on length of time performing the yard work 100-300 calories is probably all you would need to account for, unless you are doing some crazy landscaping project that is very labor intensive.

Personally I wouldn't record it, and would just eat a smaller deficit on days I'm out there. I like to keep things simple.