Can you trust the calorie burned counters on exercise equipment?
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photomom125
Posts: 4 Member
i was on a good losing streak the first four weeks on my fitness pal. Then I started really working out, not always eating back my calories and I have gained 4 lbs back. I'm drinking water, recording everything, and stay around 1200-1300. My goal is to lose 60 lbs without losing hope.
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If your fitness level is above average the exercise equipment will overestimate actual calories burned. You're much better off using a heart rate monitor that calculates calories.0
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Short answer: no, you can't trust them. Cardio machines notoriously overestimate calories burned. Even the most accurate ones give you *total* calories burned, which includes the calories you would have burned if you sat on your butt staring at Netflix the same amount of time.
If you saw the scale jump up when you started working out harder, it's likely water weight from the increased exertion. Stick with what you're doing and see what happens. The other possibility is that you are subconsciously eating more somehow because your appetite increased with the workout. (Like are you measuring or weighing all your food? Licking spoons, sneaking bits from the serving bowls, etc?)0 -
Does your scale measure body fat percentage? I had the same thing happen when I lost weight- the scale went up sometimes even... I was just gaining muscle and losing fat. Trust measurements more than the scale.0
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No it doesn't but I always remember from weight watchers years ago "muscle weighs more than fat" ugh0
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Well, the machine gives me lower numbers than the calculator for cals burned by heart rate does
http://www.calories-calculator.net/Calories_Burned_By_Heart_Rate.html
^^ gave me 296 for my average heart rate of 150, vs. 259 by the machine. Not a huge difference, though.
I think if you know you work hard, you might as well go with it. I'm not sure heart rate monitors are that much better, tbh.
Like I was giving it my max effort (30 mins). If I'd worked less hard, I guess the number could have been lower on the machine. But I can't see it making a huuuuge difference (232 cals/30 mins with a heart rate of 130 bpm).
I think if you make an effort to be active all through the day, that little margin won't matter so much.0 -
If your fitness level is above average the exercise equipment will overestimate actual calories burned. You're much better off using a heart rate monitor that calculates calories.
Many heart rate monitors also overestimate calories burned, especially for those who are relatively unfit. The better ones allow you to enter not only age, gender, height, and weight, but also your resting heart rate, maximum heart rate, and fitness level, or else they also have GPS and use GPS data to calibrate their estimates of energy use.
The website to which @tomatoey linked seems to overestimate, too. It does use the Keytel et al. formula, but that left a lot of the variance in calorie expenditure in its test subjects unexplained.0 -
Have reservations with most of whats been posted on this thread other than tomatoe, which is another point.
OP if you are looking for an answer, then you either have to be more methodical about cause and effect or you have to provide more information.
You have apparently gained 4lbs, but you can fluctuate in weight normally by 1-4lbs every day or it could just be retained water weight(pointed out above). Its impossible to say what it is becayse we dont know the math. When people dont lose its normally becayse they are understimating what they are consuming and overestimating what they are burning. More details and looking at an accurate diary would be one way to go. Recording food is ifferent from weighing and then recording. It is unclear. Its where I would look at an explanation for your apparent gain.
Normally what happens is a person just meets whatever their mauntenance level is and thus weight loss stops, or the fallback position could be water retention or just the body taking time to catch up because weight loss isnt linear.
In answer to your op about machines being acccurate, they tend to overestimate. The rower I think is pretty good but people tend not to use that. the onlu difference in reality it will make depends on how you are using those burns. MFP tends to overestimate burns and people tend to overestimate their own effort as well.
If you arent eating back then its not going to cause much problem, but if you are then you could be eating back calories you havent really burned. the rule of thumb is people tend to eat about 50% of calories and then adjust to suit based on results. You need to be doing an awful lot of exercise for it to have a significant impact and we have no idea how much or what you are doing. An hours reasonable cardio might have you burning from 400-650 calories. Its 3500 calories for 1lb weight loss or roughly an hours cardio every day.
Are you really doing that much?
Ps Muscle doesnt weight more than fat per se. Muscle is more dense than fat, which is a different thing.0 -
If your fitness level is above average the exercise equipment will overestimate actual calories burned. You're much better off using a heart rate monitor that calculates calories.
HRMs grossly over-estimate calorie burns for people who are less than fit.
The more less-fit, the grosser the over-estimate.
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I don't know if this would be helpful, OP, but I do think the subjective feeling of working hard isn't to be sneezed at.
For me, "working hard" means sweating by minute 3, streaming sweat and feeling my heart thud in my neck by minute 10, and not slacking until the cooldown. I should have to wipe my face a bunch of times. Ideally, I'm dripping sweat onto the machine itself. If that's not happening, I increase the resistance or speed until it is. When I get off the machine, my face is red. (I can't push that hard with bodyweight exercises anymore because of joint problems, so it's the machines.)
When I lost a whack of weight, I logged my exercise calories, but didn't really pay too close attention to the exact number, as long as the above happened for 30-60 minutes.
If you don't want to use my sweat-o-meter, you can refer to something like this
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Unfortunately, the subjective feeling of "working hard" doesn't correlate well with calorie burn.
You can do a half-dozen tabata intervals - all-out for 20 seconds - and be completely wiped out. And your calorie burn might only be 45 calories, because a 220 pound Usain Bolt burns all of 9 calories running a gold-medal-fast 100m sprint.
On the flip side, go for a relaxed two hour hike, barely break a sweat, and that same body will have burned 500+ calories.
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I'm not saying it's a perfect index of calories burned, but it's been shown to be a fair enough indicator of intensity. 45 calories for 20 seconds isn't too bad, I think. Although most people work out at an intensity lower than Tabata sprints, probably, they'd still burn a lot at 7-9 for 30-60 mins. and it's hard to argue that someone working out at 7-9 RPE for thirty or sixty minutes would burn less than someone able to have a conversation on the phone for that time. (at level 1-3).
I'm just saying, it makes sense to maximize your time.0 -
45 calories for 20 seconds isn't too bad, I think.
It's 45 calories for 6x 20 seconds, plus some number of minutes of rest between intervals - and then that's it, you're done, if you're doing it right.
This kind of training provides some great physiological improvements, but it's pretty poor in terms of calories/minute of training. As is the case for any training that lives up near peak power.
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45 calories for 20 seconds isn't too bad, I think.
It's 45 calories for 6x 20 seconds, plus some number of minutes of rest between intervals - and then that's it, you're done, if you're doing it right.
This kind of training provides some great physiological improvements, but it's pretty poor in terms of calories/minute of training.
That may be true, but for someone not attempting Tabata intervals who is just getting on a stationary bike or elliptical, the harder they work/the more intense their workout, the more calories they'll burn.0 -
45 calories for 20 seconds isn't too bad, I think.
It's 45 calories for 6x 20 seconds, plus some number of minutes of rest between intervals - and then that's it, you're done, if you're doing it right.
This kind of training provides some great physiological improvements, but it's pretty poor in terms of calories/minute of training.
That may be true, but for someone not attempting Tabata intervals who is just getting on a stationary bike or elliptical, the harder they work/the more intense their workout, the more calories they'll burn.
That is only correct under specific conditions. And since this is MFP it is important to realize that it is out-of-shape people for whom it is least likely to be correct - because their recovery ability from working above aerobic or lactate thresholds is extremely limited, which means they will burn out very quickly.
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45 calories for 20 seconds isn't too bad, I think.
It's 45 calories for 6x 20 seconds, plus some number of minutes of rest between intervals - and then that's it, you're done, if you're doing it right.
This kind of training provides some great physiological improvements, but it's pretty poor in terms of calories/minute of training.
That may be true, but for someone not attempting Tabata intervals who is just getting on a stationary bike or elliptical, the harder they work/the more intense their workout, the more calories they'll burn.
That is only correct under specific conditions. And since this is MFP it is important to realize that it is out-of-shape people for whom it is least likely to be correct - because their recovery ability from working above aerobic or lactate thresholds is extremely limited, which means they will burn out very quickly.
I feel like up is down and down is up right now, lol. Come on, don't be that way
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No. Use a HRM.0
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My gym used life fitness machines which had built in heart rate monitors. They have metal plates on the handles where you hold and it asked you for your weight when you began and it would track your heart rate and estimate calories burned from there. I know that this was different for everyone as my friend and I would start at the same time but we would not have the same "total calories burned" at the end. So i guess it depends on the equipment0
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It's interesting how people say that machines overestimate and a HRM is more accurate. I used a HRM a while back, when I was really fit (well, I'm still fit, just losing baby weight) and the hrm said I burned more calories on the elliptical and treadmill than the machines said.
Either way, I don't eat back exercise calories anyway, so it doesn't really matter to me.0 -
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