exercise machines.

lbeyer12
lbeyer12 Posts: 7 Member
in Fitness and Exercise
When im on an exercise machine and it tells me x many calories burned..did I really burn that many? Or is it just a crazy estimate? Should I trust the machine?

Replies

  • harryw73002
    harryw73002 Posts: 3
    I think they're fairly accurate. But what do I know? :p
  • sue_langley
    sue_langley Posts: 63 Member
    my heart rate monitor says half what my machines do and I have a variety of cardio machines
  • lbeyer12
    lbeyer12 Posts: 7 Member
    Well I do this one machine for a good 65 minutes so it says I burn about 600-700 calories (depending on my effort) and my bf was just like "you dont really know if you are actually burning that many calories". I just wanted to know cause it can def make me lose alittle bit of my motivation.
  • Kisame29
    Kisame29 Posts: 10,379 Member
    My heart rate monitor (the kind you wear as a chest strap) gives me a much lower number than exercise machines give me. For example, on an exercise bike for 1 hour (with almost all of it being "in zone" for my heart rate), it gives me 477 calories burned while my machine said somewhere around 750 calories. Since the heart rate monitor is programmed with my height, weight, age, etc, I think it is much more accurate, whereas a machine usually isn't calibrated to your measurements.

    I'm not enough of an expert though to know how much that stuff really matters though, I just know that the machine gives me a much higher number and personally I don't trust the accuracy. But if you're seeing progress with using the calories burned from those machines, then maybe they are accurate.
  • lbeyer12
    lbeyer12 Posts: 7 Member
    What heart rate monitor do you have?
  • gerla_k
    gerla_k Posts: 495 Member
    My heart rate monitor (the kind you wear as a chest strap) gives me a much lower number than exercise machines give me.

    same here.
  • kinmad4it
    kinmad4it Posts: 185 Member
    Any calorie monitor is only as accurate as the information and more importantly, the information allowed to be fed into it.
    The ones at my gym ask you your weight and that's it! Not very accurate at all, you really need one that asks for your weight, height, age and if possible Vo2 max to have a fighting chance at being slightly accurate and then they only really work for steady state monotonous cardio.
  • TeaBea
    TeaBea Posts: 14,517 Member
    What heart rate monitor do you have?

    Polar FT4 ....whatever you decide, a chest strap model will be more accurate than the wrist only jobs.

    Calorie burns depend upon height, weight, age, gender, exertion level and more. Do you plug any of this data into the machine?

    What a heart rate monitor (HRM) does is compare your resting heart rate against your heart rate while working out. A chest strap model can measure this constantly. ......Anyway, the different in heart rate is used as an estimate for exertion level.

    There is exercise (strength training) in particular....that isn't about raising your heart rate. So, HRMs are not really very good for that.

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