HOT YOGA

you can create your own exercises. I had to add bikram to mine...=)

I dont understand some the activities in the "exercise" database. Billiards, Cooking, Playing the Piano, Officiating Softball, or my all time favorite, Fishing from Boat while Sitting. How did these even get in here?? Did someone really have a heart rate monitor on while doing these things and entered them, or did the creator of MFP put them in? In any case, this leads me to my next question of, while doing your normal activities, do you count them as workouts? I was told no, that I cant count waitressing or bartending, vaccuming, and so on, as my workouts because those are my weekly to-dos and my body is used to them. Any info?

This may be hard to believe, given the ubiquity of HRMs, but no work-expenditure data is derived from using heart rate. There is a lot of data out there that has been generated over the years--some good, some bad--about the energy cost of leisure and vocational activities.

This initially was done to determine the need for rehabilitation or the viability of someone returning to work after an illness or injury (back in the days when people actually had jobs that required physical activity). The research is mainly done utilizing a metabolic cart to analyze expired air to estimate oxygen uptake. There are reference works, such as the Taylor Codes which has 12 pages (some 500 entries) of various sport and leisure activities, with an estimated energy cost for each one.

The problem with using them is matching your effort to that used during the research study to establish the standard. You can imagine the wide range of possibilities.

MFP has just pulled together a large volume of nutrition and activity information and provided tools to access that information and track your progress. MFP doesn't really "think" or actively "recommend" anything. It just has a series of automatic responses to various criteria. (this is not a criticism of MFP--every other "diet and fitness" site does the same thing; IMO, MFP is MUCH more user-friendly than other sites I have visited and overall has a much better community of members).