Believe this calories burn number?

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popo312
popo312 Posts: 78 Member
in Fitness and Exercise
I just finished my first day of T25 and it gave me a 395 calorie burn for the first cardio vid. Using a polar H7 HRM with the digit app with my info input to the best of my knowledge. Just seems high for 25 minutes of working out. I am extremely out of shape and have been doing P90 for a couple weeks but go bored. This makes those look like taking a walk around the park. This is intense!!! Still seems like a high calorie burn for the time frame but it's straight cardio like the HRM is designed for. Don't know what to make of it.

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edit:
off to see how to get images to show inline on this forum... Copy and paste the links for now if you don't mind.

edit #2: no idea why the images aren't showing up. I'll add hotlinks.

Replies

  • Blue801
    Blue801 Posts: 442
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    Lower case img and your pics will show
  • 125KC
    125KC Posts: 71 Member
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    I hear you...i have a Jarv HRM that links to the endomondo app on my iphone, and i did, just for fun, the hip hop abs extreme dvd last night and my HRM showed 587!!! I don't think it was that high...so I only posted 350 on my exercise. I average about 225 for T25 workouts.
  • Blue801
    Blue801 Posts: 442
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    I just finished my first day of T25 and it gave me a 395 calorie burn for the first cardio vid. Using a polar H7 HRM with the digit app with my info input to the best of my knowledge. Just seems high for 25 minutes of working out. I am extremely out of shape and have been doing P90 for a couple weeks but go bored. This makes those look like taking a walk around the park. This is intense!!! Still seems like a high calorie burn for the time frame but it's straight cardio like the HRM is designed for. Don't know what to make of it.

    10igzfp.jpg

    15mk83o.jpg

    5e74nd.jpg

    edit:
    off to see how to get images to show inline on this forum... Copy and paste the links for now if you don't mind.

    edit #2: no idea why the images aren't showing up. I'll add hotlinks.
  • eddiesmith1
    eddiesmith1 Posts: 1,550 Member
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    I just finished my first day of T25 and it gave me a 395 calorie burn for the first cardio vid. Using a polar H7 HRM with the digit app with my info input to the best of my knowledge. Just seems high for 25 minutes of working out. I am extremely out of shape and have been doing P90 for a couple weeks but go bored. This makes those look like taking a walk around the park. This is intense!!! Still seems like a high calorie burn for the time frame but it's straight cardio like the HRM is designed for. Don't know what to make of it.

    10igzfp.jpg

    15mk83o.jpg

    5e74nd.jpg

    edit:
    off to see how to get images to show inline on this forum... Copy and paste the links for now if you don't mind.

    edit #2: no idea why the images aren't showing up. I'll add hotlinks.

    Ha 2 of us had the same idea
  • MinnieInMaine
    MinnieInMaine Posts: 6,400 Member
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    Polar HRMs tend to be pretty accurate in my experience. I eat back all my earned calories my Polar FT4 and still lose weight fairly consistently. It's hard to say for certain not knowing all our stats but just knowing you're a guy and out of shape, having a farily high calorie burn isn't completely out of the question. The only way to test it out and know for sure is to eat back the calories going by your HRM for 3 weeks and see if you still lose weight. If you do, it's spot on. If you gain, you may want to err on the side of caution and only eat back more like 75% of earned calories.
  • Mr_Knight
    Mr_Knight Posts: 9,532 Member
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    I just finished my first day of T25 and it gave me a 395 calorie burn for the first cardio vid....Just seems high for 25 minutes of working out.

    It is high. Cut it in half and go from there. Might have to cut it again, but at least you'll be in the "small error" ballpark.

    Remember - HRMs don't actually measure calorie burn, they guess at it, just like MFP. And the worse your physical fitness level, the bigger the error in your HRM's guess will be (which is exactly opposite of what you want, unfortunately).
  • wonderwoman234
    wonderwoman234 Posts: 551 Member
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    It depends on how much you weigh and how fit you are. If it was REALLY intense the entire time, it could be accurate. As you continue to do it, your body will adjust and you will burn less. If you are overweight and out of shape, I'm guessing it will be accurate. You will burn more than a normal weight, in shape person doing the same workout.
  • popo312
    popo312 Posts: 78 Member
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    It was pretty intense as you can see from the average HR during the workout.
    I just finished my first day of T25 and it gave me a 395 calorie burn for the first cardio vid....Just seems high for 25 minutes of working out.

    It is high. Cut it in half and go from there. Might have to cut it again, but at least you'll be in the "small error" ballpark.

    Remember - HRMs don't actually measure calorie burn, they guess at it, just like MFP. And the worse your physical fitness level, the bigger the error in your HRM's guess will be (which is exactly opposite of what you want, unfortunately).

    My fitness level sucks IMHO. My cardio is horrid. Former pack a day smoker of 15 years now using ecigs for nine months so I don't have the lung capacity of most but it's getting better the farther away I get from when I quite but never will be normal.
    It depends on how much you weigh and how fit you are. If it was REALLY intense the entire time, it could be accurate. As you continue to do it, your body will adjust and you will burn less. If you are overweight and out of shape, I'm guessing it will be accurate. You will burn more than a normal weight, in shape person doing the same workout.

    5'10" 186-189lbs depending on the day. Started at 190 and you can look at my diary, lost about 3 pounds in a month. (todays weight was an anomaly, lost 2lbs overnight) I don't have a ton of weight to lose so not expecting super fast weight loss, really just aiming to cut some inches on the waist line like most guys. Aiming for 170. I'm slim otherwise with not much muscle mass.

    So consensus is to eat back half the cals or 1/4? I have MFP set at 1lb a week which puts me at a touch under 1800 cals a day which I have at times trouble hitting since I've cut out fried foods. I'm going better adding peanuts products.
  • hill8570
    hill8570 Posts: 1,466 Member
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    Seems a mite high. I usually log the T25 cardio and speed workouts around 300 calories (kind of a generic high-impact aerobic workout), and my weight loss seems to be more-or-less in line with expectations. It's a relatively intense 25 minutes if you push yourself hard through the whole thing.
  • Azdak
    Azdak Posts: 8,281 Member
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    Given your weight and my estimate of your fitness level, I would put your calorie burn at about 250--and that might be generous. I don't know all the moves in a T25 workout, but most of those include a warm up and cool down. You'd have to average 8 METs to even burn 250, and that's fairly aggressive for someone who is admittedly deconditioned.

    You also seem to have a higher-than-average HRmax, which is the key reason the numbers are inflated. The device assumes your HRmax is "x" when it is likely "x+15 or 20". So it assumes you are working harder than you are.
  • Azdak
    Azdak Posts: 8,281 Member
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    I would be extremely suspicious of any exercise calorie numbers in any of these devices. I don't know how these companies derive their algorithms, but, given the proliferation of these devices, I find it hard to believe they are doing serious research. Polar has been researching heart rate response to exercise for 20-25 years and their devices yield only rough approximations. Can't imagine a company that was a VC start up a couple of years ago would have anywhere near even that level of expertise.
  • popo312
    popo312 Posts: 78 Member
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    Given your weight and my estimate of your fitness level, I would put your calorie burn at about 250--and that might be generous. I don't know all the moves in a T25 workout, but most of those include a warm up and cool down. You'd have to average 8 METs to even burn 250, and that's fairly aggressive for someone who is admittedly deconditioned.

    You also seem to have a higher-than-average HRmax, which is the key reason the numbers are inflated. The device assumes your HRmax is "x" when it is likely "x+15 or 20". So it assumes you are working harder than you are.

    What is a MET?

    Probably doesn't make a huge difference but there is no warm up or cool down there. Just 25 straight minutes of hardcore cardio. There is a cool down stretch at the end after the 25 minutes but I turn off the monitor for that and only record the cardio.
  • popo312
    popo312 Posts: 78 Member
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    bump
  • cwolfman13
    cwolfman13 Posts: 41,871 Member
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    bump

    you can pretty much take what Azdak said to the bank....

    There's no way you burned near 400 calories in 25 minutes of exercise.
  • alasin1derland
    alasin1derland Posts: 575 Member
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    I average 270 on the cardio T25 give or take a couple calories. I have seen others post similar numbers as mine.
  • MB2MN
    MB2MN Posts: 334 Member
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    [/quote]

    What is a MET?


    [/quote]

    MET- Metabolic Equivalent of Task. It's basically a scale that measures how hard you are working on a scale of 1-10 (think being sedentary to full out running). An easy cycle would be a 5ish, jog would be a 7...blah blah. Some cardio equipment will show it on the readout. It's just another measure other than HR to monitor how hard you're working.
  • Mr_Knight
    Mr_Knight Posts: 9,532 Member
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    What is a MET?

    MET is a way of estimating energy expenditure of different exercises, normalized to a standard fitness level (technically, a standard V02max). Since some activities (i.e. running X miles over Y minutes) have straight forward calorie burn calculations, you can use MET to get burn estimates for other types of exercise.

    For example, running 8 minute miles has an MET of 12, while using a stair master with similar effort level has an MET of 5.5. Since we know the calorie burn for running 30 minutes (a 170 pounder will burn right at 400 calories), we can estimate that the same individual will burn about 180 calories at the same effort level on a stair master.

    If the activity were a typical Pilates class, which has an MET of about 3.5, the burn would be about 110 calories.

    MET isn't perfect, but using METs would get rid of most of the horror-show burn over-estimates seen all over MFP.

    The other thing with MET is that it allows scaling by fitness level. So if we know how much a fit person burns at a given activity, we can get a solid estimate on what a person at varying degrees of unfitness would burn at that same activity, for the same level of perceived effort.

    For example, someone out of shape will only burn 30% of the calories of a fit person doing a T25 or P90X workout, even though the unfit person *feels* like they're working just as hard.

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