using my HRM at work, help!!

Your average work day should be counted into your energy expenditure (lightly active, very active, so on) on your MFP profile. You shouldn't track basic work tasks or life tasks as exercise unless they bring your heart rate up considerably. You burn calories naturally doing everything from breathing to sleeping - it only counts towards exercise if you're truly extending your body beyond its usual limits. Definitely don't track it. Only track swift walks, jogging, full blown steady state cardio, so on.

Try finding your average heart rate and plug the numbers in to this site. http://www.shapesense.com/fitness-exercise/calculators/heart-rate-based-calorie-burn-calculator.aspx

And don;t even get me started about annual inventory! Isn't that a fun time?

ElizabethOakes2 wrote: »

I managed bookstores for 12 years. Hell yah, that's about accurate. I think people who've never worked in a bookstore or reorganized shelves of books for a living have no idea how hard of work it is!
(My 1st bookstore, the stock room was on the second floor, and we had to raise book shipments up to the top by loading them in a dumbwaiter with a pulley, then unloading them, checking them in, and then carrying them down the stairs to the sales floor. Random House shipments kept me fit!

As to the people telling you not to count it as exercise because it's a part of your daily activity also have no idea how hard you're working during the day. I would come home from work WAY too exhausted to "go to the gym", or even to take a walk around the block. I was 130 pounds, and every inch was muscle. You can't tell me that's not exercise.

I mean this as supportive, but it is not exercise. The heart monitor is not to be used to record anything other than steady state and the heart monitor can even pick up when you get anxiety or scared and tell you have burned calories..

This is not accurate what she says.. sorry..

I know you are bad tired, but does not count for the reasons you say.

angelamichelle_xo wrote: »

... my HRM reads 377 cal burned in 1 hour. do you think this is accurate?

I would say it's very unlikely to be accurate.

You'll have burned c75-100 cals in that hour anyway as BMR.

So a couple of aspects to consider, first being what contributes to work done and how much energy you expend. That's a function of mass and distance. Essentially you've moved say 300-400lbs of mass a distance of a few metres.

To put it in perspective, move them a mile and you'll burn a couple of hundred calories.

Now the issue of whether your HRM is likely to give you a meaningful estimate in those circumstances. HRMs are designed around research done on steady state, aerobic range, effort. You're unlikely to be in the aerobic range, your HR should be quit low so not getting into the range where the relationship between HR and calories is predictable. You'll also have been fluctuating. Both of those would lead the algorithms to overestimate.

angelamichelle_xo wrote: »

i know HRMs work best when you're keeping a steady heart rate whilst exercising, so i waited until i had a pretty decent task to do. i work at a bookstore. my task was to swap two sections (4 book cases each, 8 total) and so far ive only done half of it. which is an hours worth of work. swapping bookcases by taking chunks of books at a time, in each hand, walking them to the bookcase nearby and placing them there. sometimes squatting to grab books from the lower shelf and standing to put them on the higher shelf. no interruptions from customers, just straight shifting. i was sweating a little too. my HRM reads 377 cal burned in 1 hour. do you think this is accurate? i usually dont wear my HRM to work, but i wanted to test it out.

sorry if this seems silly. (coincidentally enough, i was swapping the humor and the sports sections. bahaha the irony.)

help!

What kind of HRM is it? Chest strap type is a lot more accurate than the optical or wrist sensor types (and those often don't take data as frequently).

I don't know if you run or have tried to run recently, but I try to compare my effort to running when I'm trying to figure out if a calorie burn is reasonable. Average person burns 100 calories / mile. An overweight/untrained person might burn between 125-150 calories/mile. So if I assume 135 calories / mile that would be like running 2.75 miles.

In the past I have used an elliptical for like a half hour and the machine will say something crazy, like I burned 450 calories in 30 minutes. But then I think to myself, did that feel like running more than 3 miles? No. So I probably didn't burn that much. However, if you were lifting books and carrying them around, that is a really great start to some good strength training. Strength training won't burn as many calories per minute as straight up cardio, but building (or maintaining as we lose) muscles will help us burn more calories as we get down to goal weight, and just make us stronger and more capable all around. Also the more activity you can squeeze into your day, the higher your TDEE, the better your burn, and either the faster you will lose weight or the more you can eat if you are trying to maintain. So keep it up!