Cycling Calories

I've just got into cycling. I ride a fixed gear. So even when I'm gliding for a couple minutes, I know my heart rate is still up. I also take a route that's mostly up hill. And because I don't have gears to change, it's reeeeeeeallly hard. So I'm definitely counting every second of my rides. Runtastic automatically pauses when I'm stopped at a light or whatever, so I don't have to worry about the timing thing. Or it adding my stopped time into my average pace. Hope that helps!

I've got a Garmin HRM with GPS and bike attachment which gives you all that info. It's pretty neat and something that i would recommend to anyone. I need to start getting out more often.

I've been using the Map My Ride app to help me figure out how much I'm burning. It uses GPS to track your distance and pace. It will tell you your pace every mile! I've noticed that instead of acknowledging that I've stopped at a light, it will just say my split speed (or speed for that one mile) is lower. It will also tell you how many calories your burnt each ride, which is pretty comparable to the amounts I get when plugging it in MFP.

This is what I've been doing, although I recently started wearing a HRM, so am comparing the two. I am happy I finally figured out to look at the splits so I can work on speed in the non city street part of my ride and compare ride to ride. Since the city parts end up with a slower average speed due to all the stops, I figure it's fair to use the averaged out time, distance, and speed to count the overall calories. Recommend MMR, however, as it's fun to see all the details about speed and the route and for me it's correct as to the distances I know.

Although I just use bike rides as a "day-off" exercise, if you are serious about bike rides and counting, there are cadence monitors that will take the revolutions of the pedal/pace/size of tires to give you the calories burned.

I just use Endomondo and turn on the auto pause feature. It feeds the rides info back onto MFP so by the time I get inside and press record the whole this is done for me.

The pauses really do not matter much to me though, the estimates are just based off average speed and duration. You actually burn more calories starting and stopping since it takes more energy to start a bike moving than it does to keep it moving. Without the tracker pausing it just lowers the average speed over time and will spit out a slightly lower number of calories burned per hour of riding.

It's all just estimates though. Endomondo said I burned 4000 calories yesterday while a different website said 6000 calories. With a pound of bacon difference between the two I take them both with a grain of salt.

A heart rate monitor would probably get you to a closer estimate but I'm not that specific with all this. I figure if I exercise and eat well I'll lose weight eventually without having to do algebra to get my numbers just right.

I find the MFP overestimates the amount of calories burned by a LOT. For example, today I road 75 minutes at about 26.5 km/hr, they estimated I burned over 1000 calories, but based on my heart rate monitor it was 700.

I use moving time not total time.

I also don't glide too much, really just when I'm on my way to stopping at a stop sign or stop light. If I'm going down hill, I just increase my gears and push harder. It has to be a very steep hill for me to run out of gears.