HRM/Calories Burned - to log or not to log?

I don't turn my HRM off until my heartrate has gone down. You're still burning more calories when your heart is up than when its at your normal resting heartrate. And I do record those!

Wait until your heart rate and breathing return to normal...

At home, I stop it as soon as my workout is over. At the gym, I stop it once I hit the locker room door.

Here is my take.

Press start when you start your workout

Press stop once your workout stops - you could wait till your heart rate drops if you really want. But to be perfectly honest with you, personally after burning approx 800cal during a workout the extra 10-50 isn't going to make much of a difference in the scheme of things.

Simple.

The only thing to consider is that if you are taking a longer break e.g. toilet break, someone stops to chat to you (over 2min) I will stop the monitor.

If you really want to be the most precise, also make sure that you are only logging calories burned in ADDITION to what you would have burned sitting on the couch since MFP already accounts for those. For example- if your resting metabolic rate is 1800 calories, you burn 75 calories an hour doing nothing. If you work out for a total of 1.5 hours, and you burn 800 calories on your HRM- deduct the 75 calories from the first hour and 37.5 from the second hour to come up with a total of 687.5 calories.

It might not seem like a big deal when you only work out for 45 minutes- but you end up counting those extra 56.25 burned calories twice. That's if you are anal and want to be super precise and accurate

Read this (and the other blog post linked to in the very beginning of this one): http://www.myfitnesspal.com/blog/Azdak/view/calories-burned-during-exercise-it-s-the-intensity-not-the-heart-rate-that-counts-26524

He explains that the heart rate is NOT indicative of extra calories being burned directly, but more a measurement that can (under certain circumstances - specifically steady-state cardio) be used to estimate what the caloric burn really is. So at the end of your actual workout, you're no longer using those large muscle groups which are what actually burns the extra calories during a workout, I would read 2 things into this
1) Using a typical (ie Polar/Timex/Mio/etc) HRM during non-cardio workouts is really not going to give anything like an accurate estimate anyway and
2) The algorithm used to estimate calorie burn stops being even remotely accurate once the actual activity stops (in steady state cardio exercises)

As for the advisability of being anal and deducting your BMR or RMR calories per minute * number of minutes of exercise, I believe that depends on the specific HRM you are using. In my own case, I replaced a physically damaged (cracked screen) but functional Polar F55 with a Polar FT60, programmed them identically (V02 Max, weight/gender/etc) and did an identical workout (allowing 2 days rest time between) at as close to identical perceived exertion/intensity level, and got a significantly higher result from the new FT60 than from the F55. Interestingly the numbers from the F55 were almost exactly what I would get by deducting my RMR * minutes of exercise from what the FT60 reported. That leads me to believe that some Polar units include an automatic deduction of "normal/resting" calories while others do not.

In my own case, I now only use my HRM for timing duration of my non-cardio workouts (unless I'm doing circuits with low resistance), and I _DO_ back out my resting calories from what my HRM shows for cardio before I log it on MFP, but I'm OCD like that. In fairness it is a recent change for me to do so, triggered by the observation of the different results between my 2 Polar HRMs and reading Azdak's blog entries (linked above).