Are Treadmill Calorie Counters Usually Accurate?

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SomeShenanigans
SomeShenanigans Posts: 27 Member
in Fitness and Exercise
This is kind of hypothetical as I don't normally eat back/eat back very few of my calories burned, but just to get an idea of how accurate the treadmill I have at home is... weighing 145, jogging 5 mph for 10 minutes usually wins me about 100 calories. Does that sound about accurate? Would I generally be able to trust any speed/weight combination if it is?

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  • sammyliftsandeats
    sammyliftsandeats Posts: 2,421 Member
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    They are usually inflated - but I think putting your age and weight into the treadmill makes it a bit more accurate than just pressing quick start and going.

    I think the default burn is for 150 lbs...but if you weigh less than that, you'd burn less and if you weigh more than that, you'd burn more.

    It also depends on if your machine takes into consideration other factors such as your heart rate, speed, incline, etc.
  • ConicalFern
    ConicalFern Posts: 121 Member
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    If I want to know calories from running I always use my HRM, or values of cal/km from other similar runs if I wasn't wearing one.

    That said, I find the runners world calorie calculator to give me the closest estimate of calories burnt: http://www.runnersworld.com/fitness-calculators/calories-burned-calculator#

    I find this is closest for shorter runs (5k) than longer ones (15k+), even when expressed as a percentage. On the whole, it is still a little over though, by around 10%.
  • SomeShenanigans
    SomeShenanigans Posts: 27 Member
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    Fortunately my treadmill does allow me to enter in a weight amount and the speed at which they are burned does seem to slow when the weight amount entered goes down.
  • RoxieDawn
    RoxieDawn Posts: 15,488 Member
    edited May 2016
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    The answer is no. No device such as apps, fitness equipment computers, fitness trackers, or even HRM's are 100% accurate. If you want to eat back some of your calories, try eating back 40 to 50 percent of the calorie burn output from the device and add additional calories as needed to create energy balance.

    There is a lot of questions that come around about this and no one knows exactly how calories they burn.. But the devices can be a good indicator for estimations.

    http://fit101.org/the-step-by-step-guide-to-losing-weight-with-myfitnesspal/#exercise
  • Jruzer
    Jruzer Posts: 3,501 Member
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    Actually, my experience has been that treadmills are fairly accurate. That said they usually give a gross burn, and what you need is the net burn. I always subtract 2 kcal/min to make up the difference.
  • BrianSharpe
    BrianSharpe Posts: 9,248 Member
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    To sanity check your results at your weight you'd burn (assuming relatively flat terrain) a little over 91cal / mile (.63 x weight in lbs x distance in miles) so if it's giving you 100 cal for something under a mile it's off (but not horribly....)
  • SomeShenanigans
    SomeShenanigans Posts: 27 Member
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    I'll have to check the distance on the 5 mph for 10 minutes... tbh I never really looked at it, mostly concerned with the calorie count and time it took. But I'll check that out tonight, hopefully it's accurate. Again I suppose it doesn't matter much if I'm not eating them but it would be good to know I suppose.

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