Calories burned

taylorpigg
taylorpigg Posts: 10 Member
in Fitness and Exercise
How do you know how many calories you actually burned during the exercise? The treadmill for example the calories it says you burned walking for a half hour correct or no? Because many people say the calories on this app when you put in your exercise is not right.

Replies

  • rileysowner
    rileysowner Posts: 8,321 Member
    All of them, unless you are connected to a breathing mask that measures the difference between what you inhale and what you exhale, are estimates. Of the three popular machines, treadmills do fairly well in their estimates assuming you are able to put in your personal information like weight, sex, etc. I know people say this app over estimates the number, but at the same time, I know of people here who ate all the calories they earned using the numbers from Myfitnesspal, and they lost the weight they wanted to. That tells me that not all the numbers here are off. I personally would go with whatever is lowest. After 4 weeks or so, assuming your food logging is accurate, and that is a whole other issue, see how you supposed deficit matches up with your actual weight loss. That will help you give a much more accurate number.
  • dxlee7
    dxlee7 Posts: 23 Member
    I use a heart rate device to measure my heart rate and use that to calculate my calories. There's a formula with body weight, age and heart rate. I'll look for it and post it here for you.
  • taylorpigg
    taylorpigg Posts: 10 Member
    Also on this app it says when you do like strength training you don't burn calories? How can that be? Doing squats, sit ups and other exercises don't burn calories??
  • EddieP50
    EddieP50 Posts: 192 Member
    If it doesn't elevate your heart rate then you wouldn't be burning extra calories. You would just be burning the same calories as your daily activities. I use a Polar H7 chest strap HR monitor synced to the Polar Beat app on my phone. You input your profile (age, height, weight, sex, etc.). My bike has a user profile setup also. My exercise bike has a profile setup also. Most of the time the two show near the same calorie burn. But with the heart rate in the 2nd zone the chest strap usually shows more calories.
  • Ready2Rock206
    Ready2Rock206 Posts: 9,487 Member
    taylorpigg wrote: »
    Also on this app it says when you do like strength training you don't burn calories? How can that be? Doing squats, sit ups and other exercises don't burn calories??

    Log them add strength training under cardio. The strength training section is for tracking. The calories probably won't be accurate, but that's how you'd log them.
  • nutmegoreo
    nutmegoreo Posts: 15,532 Member
    Ready2Rock206 wrote: »
    taylorpigg wrote: »
    Also on this app it says when you do like strength training you don't burn calories? How can that be? Doing squats, sit ups and other exercises don't burn calories??

    Log them add strength training under cardio. The strength training section is for tracking. The calories probably won't be accurate, but that's how you'd log them.

    ^^^ This. Strength training doesn't burn a lot of calories, if you are talking about heavy lifting with pauses between sets type of thing. If you are talking doing 150 body weight squats as quickly as you can, then you will burn a few more calories, but the estimator on here is not great. Eat back about half of the calories burned. Track for several weeks and then adjust based on your actual results.
  • taylorpigg
    taylorpigg Posts: 10 Member
    So the treadmill I used and elliptical both have heart rate monitors built into them so since you all are saying heart rate is how I should measure calories then when the treadmill says I burned 340 calories that it's correct bc it has been measuring my heart rate?

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