Calories burned...

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lucyholdcroft363
lucyholdcroft363 Posts: 124 Member
in Fitness and Exercise
I don't have a heart rate monitor just yet, so I rely on calculators and the machine to tell me how many calories I've burned. However, my spinning machine tells me I've burned 650-750 in 50-60 minutes and while I do go at it pretty hard and its very strenuous, I'm not quite sure that's a very accurate measurement. Does anybody have any advice, insight or methods? I have ordered a monitor but its going to take a month to come!

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  • hgycta
    hgycta Posts: 3,013 Member
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    It's going to be hard to ever truly know how many calories you burned unfortunately, even with a heart rate monitor. Always allow room for error! Generally what I've noticed people do is eat back every calorie they burn if their goal is to gain weight, eat back half to maintain, and eat back none to lose. I do know machines are known to overestimate how many calories you burned, so just play around with the numbers and keep track of your measurements and how you feel!
  • slucki01
    slucki01 Posts: 284 Member
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    Depending on your weight, it sounds reasonable. However, I wouldn't recommend eating all those calories back. I typically eat about 1/2 my exercise calories and I'm losing weight.
  • sijomial
    sijomial Posts: 19,811 Member
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    I can burn 750 in a hard session on an indoor trainer in an hour.
    But my fitness level is also rated as "elite" and I can cycle 100 miles for perspective.

    Very, very rough rule of thumb (purely IMHO) is that more than 600/hour requires a good level of fitness and working pretty hard.

    As for methods, I ate back all my exercise calories whether losing, maintaining or gaining.
    In the end you can simply pick a method, be consistent and adjust calories based on actual results.
    A lot of people invest a bit too much in trying to be "accurate" when being consistent works well enough.
  • rg1949
    rg1949 Posts: 12 Member
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    On stationary bikes your weight doesn't matter as it is supported, unless you are standing on the pedals. On my Stationary bike if I spin for 60 minutes at 25kph the bike meter says I have burned about 600 cals. I checked this against heart rate calculators and other means and it seems to be a good number.

    I wondered about wearing ankle weights and read on many forums that such weights did not add calories to spinning but I sure work and sweat more with the weights... Besides doing the physics the ankle weights do in fact add work as they change the mass of the effective flywheel that one is expending energy/burning cals to keep spinning. They are not simply being lifted so one going up does not offset one going down.

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