Crossfit exercise in log options

It's under your food diary as Kool-aid.

Upstate_Dunadan wrote: »

Just create a custom cardio exercise called CrossFit. That's the easy part. Determining your burn is the tricky part. I tracked mine for several months wearing a Polar HR chest strap, and found (understanding the problems with using HR to calculate a non-cardio burn) my normal range was 450 to 1,000 depending on how much the workout slated towards cardio. I now use an average of 650 and add or subtract based on the type of workout and how hard it was. I wear a Polar A360 wrist monitor now and it generally supports the same range.

Keep in mind HRMs are used to calculate calories for steady state cardio...

An HRM is using an equation based on your heart rate and assuming a relationship between oxygen uptake that would normally be used for steady state, cardiovascular exercise. When you run/walk your heart rate increases because your heart must pump more blood to meet the energy demand of the activity. When you lift weights, your heart rate increases to compensate for internal pressures and stresses but there is not a corresponding increase in oxygen uptake or in energy use. So therefore the HRM will give you an inflated number since it doesn't know what you did and is just using an equation based on your heart rate. All things that raise heart rate do not result in higher energy burn, think of being scared for instance.

The best way to figure out what your true burn is would be to use a best estimate and see if it's working over time. If your food diary is accurate and you are logging and weighing all your food, then you should be losing weight at a predicted value. If you are losing slower than you expect, it's possible your calorie burn estimations are inflated. Not everyone's will be the same, trial and error and experimentation are the best ways.

Personally, I try to compare a new activity to running for the same amount of time. The MFP value for circuit training will often give me 500 calories for an hour. But I can tell at the end I am not as winded or as tired as if I had just run 5 or more miles, so I don't feel that estimate is accurate for me.

I was actually just wondering the same thing!

blues4miles wrote: »

Upstate_Dunadan wrote: »

Just create a custom cardio exercise called CrossFit. That's the easy part. Determining your burn is the tricky part. I tracked mine for several months wearing a Polar HR chest strap, and found (understanding the problems with using HR to calculate a non-cardio burn) my normal range was 450 to 1,000 depending on how much the workout slated towards cardio. I now use an average of 650 and add or subtract based on the type of workout and how hard it was. I wear a Polar A360 wrist monitor now and it generally supports the same range.

Keep in mind HRMs are used to calculate calories for steady state cardio...

An HRM is using an equation based on your heart rate and assuming a relationship between oxygen uptake that would normally be used for steady state, cardiovascular exercise. When you run/walk your heart rate increases because your heart must pump more blood to meet the energy demand of the activity. When you lift weights, your heart rate increases to compensate for internal pressures and stresses but there is not a corresponding increase in oxygen uptake or in energy use. So therefore the HRM will give you an inflated number since it doesn't know what you did and is just using an equation based on your heart rate. All things that raise heart rate do not result in higher energy burn, think of being scared for instance.

The best way to figure out what your true burn is would be to use a best estimate and see if it's working over time. If your food diary is accurate and you are logging and weighing all your food, then you should be losing weight at a predicted value. If you are losing slower than you expect, it's possible your calorie burn estimations are inflated. Not everyone's will be the same, trial and error and experimentation are the best ways.

Personally, I try to compare a new activity to running for the same amount of time. The MFP value for circuit training will often give me 500 calories for an hour. But I can tell at the end I am not as winded or as tired as if I had just run 5 or more miles, so I don't feel that estimate is accurate for me.

Yes, hence the reason I included in my post the following comment -

"(understanding the problems with using HR to calculate a non-cardio burn)"

In the end, as mentioned (surprising enough) in another current post on the limitations or HRM, everything is an estimate, even the calorie content of the food we eat. Any errors in the logic that Polar builds into my HRM is consistent, so I expect it to be wrong (+/-) by the same amount. It's further not accurate (I know) because I continue to burn extra calories for days after my workouts while my body repairs itself. That post workout burn is not something you'd get with normal steady state cardio, so there's an additional element of inaccuracy on the negative side (i.e. I'm burning more calories from the strength component of my workouts than someone who was doing cardio even if the HR algorithm was perfect for non steady-state cardio). So with all these elements of inaccuracy and estimation, in the end, it's real world results that matter. If you swear your HRM is accurate, enter those calories and add them to your daily goal (assuming you use MFP goals the classic way) and find you are not losing weight/gaining weight, etc. then you're going to adjust your base goal, or decide to only eat back a portion of your exercise burn. In my case, I used a TDEE formula to set my original weight loss goal, then adjusted it from there when I moved into maintenance/weight gain mode. I adjust my custom goal as needed based on the results I'm seeing. So in the end, I'm not using my burn rates to set my daily goal. I just monitor them for the fun of it and to track my estimated "work" value. I can guarantee if my A360 shows I burned 1,000 calories, that was a workout with a heavy cardio/conditioning component. If it shows 400 calories, rare to happen, it was almost exclusively a strength/lifting day.

I do crossfit too. when I wear my polar watch, I burn on avg400-750 calories depending on the wrkout/intensity.