What considered light, moderate, or vigorous effort?

Getting a HRM changed my whole outlook on what I was actually burning during workouts on the treadmill and bike. There are a lot of cheaper models out there if you are tight on cash that might be not nearly as acurate as others, but even those would be better than the inputs on machines and the calculator on this site. I was off by 150 calories on my one workout using the generic counter on here! I got myself a Polar FT4 as a WOOHOO gift to myself for losing like 25-30 pounds. I think I found it cheapest for like 65 bucks, but worth every penny!!

I set it on hills/intervals when I do the bike, and the resistance is usually fairly hard for me, but my heart rate rarely goes above 120, even though I feel like I'm using almost every bit of my strength to move the pedals.

This. Even though I feel the burn in my thighs from pedaling through the resistance, my HR doesn't really budge.

I have been using my fitness pal for just over 80 days now I have lost 24 pounds I am so thankful for this app and now I`m just looking to make some friends on here for the much needed support.

dave4d wrote: »

I'm not sure of the full reason why, but I think on the bike, since you aren't moving your actual weight, your weight doesn't really matter for the caloric burn. The machine goes by what energy it determines would be used to push at the resistance it offers. It should be fairly accurate.

I set it on hills/intervals when I do the bike, and the resistance is usually fairly hard for me, but my heart rate rarely goes above 120, even though I feel like I'm using almost every bit of my strength to move the pedals. The calories burned is usually about half of what I would get on a treadmill, or elliptical.

Mfp's numbers are always a lot higher than what I get from the machine.

In no ways am I an expert, scientist or the like. . But the larger the mass(body weight) the more energy(calories burned) is required to sustain even the smallest of functions/movements. So if we were boiling it down to simplest terms, I would suspect a 300lb person to burn quite a few more calories than a 100lb person doing the same exercise at the same intensity, for the same amount of time (all things being equal, besides the weight of course). Gravity still exists, even when you're on a stationary bike.

ashesfromfire wrote: »

This is how it was explained to me, as a good way to estimate it:

Light effort: You can hold a conversation, or can sing
Moderate: You can talk if you need to, cannot sing
Vigorous: Very hard to speak

I do that test with myself when I'm working out to see where I'm at

I like that description- and use it when I cycle. Unfortunately that test doesn't work for swimming and the calorie burn estimates I see on my watch, in MFP, and in web research seem so over the top that I don't feel I can trust any of them . So if I swim for an hour ( any intensity) I just allow myself 250 calories post workout and figure if it was actually higher, good on me.

Great thread here. I'm wondering about my own bike rides. I have several steep and intimidating hills on this 3.5 mile route I do three times per week (I just started; my third ride today). When I get to the top of these hills I am nearly unable to be able to take enough air in. I couldn't speak if I wanted to other than "aaaaggghhhhh!!".

When I enter in, say, "moderate" biking for 20 minutes, it tells me I burned 216 calories. That's all well and good. Who knows? But when I put in "vigorous" bike ride for the same time, it tells me 323 calories burned.

My question is this: Another person, say Rider B, in great shape could do my same route in the same time and not be breathing heavy at all, effectively moderate for him. Rider A, me, does it as fast as he can and at the end is completely and utterly spent. It takes about 10 minutes for me to breathe normally again.

I'd say Rider A did a VIGOROUS workout, while RIDER B did a moderate workout, right? Did we burn the same about of calories because we covered the same distance on the same bike with the same body weight in the same time? Or did the fact that RIDER B wasn't challenged nearly as much mean that less calories were burned?

Or conversely, if RIDER A goes all out to exhaustion because he's in pathetic physical condition, did he burn more calories?

I guess it comes down to "vigorous" versus "moderate". The ride is quite vigorous to me, but for a great rider it wouldn't be much effort at all to do it in the same time I did it. Who burned more calories if all other specs are the same?

dagiffy wrote: »

Great thread here. I'm wondering about my own bike rides. I have several steep and intimidating hills on this 3.5 mile route I do three times per week (I just started; my third ride today). When I get to the top of these hills I am nearly unable to be able to take enough air in. I couldn't speak if I wanted to other than "aaaaggghhhhh!!".

When I enter in, say, "moderate" biking for 20 minutes, it tells me I burned 216 calories. That's all well and good. Who knows? But when I put in "vigorous" bike ride for the same time, it tells me 323 calories burned.

My question is this: Another person, say Rider B, in great shape could do my same route in the same time and not be breathing heavy at all, effectively moderate for him. Rider A, me, does it as fast as he can and at the end is completely and utterly spent. It takes about 10 minutes for me to breathe normally again.

I'd say Rider A did a VIGOROUS workout, while RIDER B did a moderate workout, right? Did we burn the same about of calories because we covered the same distance on the same bike with the same body weight in the same time? Or did the fact that RIDER B wasn't challenged nearly as much mean that less calories were burned?

Or conversely, if RIDER A goes all out to exhaustion because he's in pathetic physical condition, did he burn more calories?

I guess it comes down to "vigorous" versus "moderate". The ride is quite vigorous to me, but for a great rider it wouldn't be much effort at all to do it in the same time I did it. Who burned more calories if all other specs are the same?

If you don't want to get a HRM, like AnvilHead suggested above (reread his post) then you'll have to do some guesswork.

I have a long hike I take three-five times a week. It is almost all downhill on the way in and all uphill on the way back. I took several estimates, including a HRM, and I averaged them. I used that number for three months. Turns out I lost weight at the exact predicted rate, so I knew it was close enough.

It sounds like about a hundred calorie swing for you between moderate and vigorous. Why don't you pick half-way between the two and use that for a while, see what happens.

This is not an exact science and all of us use some degree of estimation. Luckily "close enough" will work if you are consistent and as accurate as you can guess.

Bicycling, <10 mph, leisure (cycling, biking, bike...
Bicycling, 10-12 mph, light (cycling, biking, bike...
Bicycling, 12-14 mph, moderate (cycling, biking, b...
Bicycling, 16-20 mph, very fast (cycling, biking, ...
Bicycling, >20 mph, racing (cycling, biking, bike ...

dagiffy wrote: »

Great thread here. I'm wondering about my own bike rides. I have several steep and intimidating hills on this 3.5 mile route I do three times per week (I just started; my third ride today). When I get to the top of these hills I am nearly unable to be able to take enough air in. I couldn't speak if I wanted to other than "aaaaggghhhhh!!".

When I enter in, say, "moderate" biking for 20 minutes, it tells me I burned 216 calories. That's all well and good. Who knows? But when I put in "vigorous" bike ride for the same time, it tells me 323 calories burned.

My question is this: Another person, say Rider B, in great shape could do my same route in the same time and not be breathing heavy at all, effectively moderate for him. Rider A, me, does it as fast as he can and at the end is completely and utterly spent. It takes about 10 minutes for me to breathe normally again.

I'd say Rider A did a VIGOROUS workout, while RIDER B did a moderate workout, right? Did we burn the same about of calories because we covered the same distance on the same bike with the same body weight in the same time? Or did the fact that RIDER B wasn't challenged nearly as much mean that less calories were burned?

Or conversely, if RIDER A goes all out to exhaustion because he's in pathetic physical condition, did he burn more calories?

I guess it comes down to "vigorous" versus "moderate". The ride is quite vigorous to me, but for a great rider it wouldn't be much effort at all to do it in the same time I did it. Who burned more calories if all other specs are the same?

While the RPE (rate of perceived exertion) kinds of standards (like the "can you talk" thing above) are a useful rule of thumb for training, nothing is really perfect for calorie estimation. For cardio, perceived exertion correlates pretty well with heart rate (which is what you care about for CV fitness training purposes), but it's much more loosely correlated with calorie burn.

In particular, there's a popular perception that a trained/fit person burns materially fewer calories doing X than an untrained/unfit person doing the same X, because the untrained person is exerting themselves more to do the same amount of work. Another way to put it is that people think the trained person is more "efficient", so they need less exertion to do the same work, so burn fewer calories.

It's really not true, at least in any major way. Mostly, what determines calorie burn is the physical work being done, in pretty much the physics sense of "work". Heavy people burn more doing some things (like walking) because they're moving a heavy body around, compared to lighter people. But a 200 pound person walking Y distance at Z speed is going to burn about the same number of calories as a 150 pound person wearing a 50 pound backpack.

So, in your rider example, if the conditions are the same, and the riders the same size*, but one is trained and the other isn't, they'll burn about the same number of calories, even though one of them will feel as if they're working harder because they're not as conditioned. "Efficiency" come in pretty much only to the extent that the trained person wastes less effort through poor technique, not because s/he finishes feeling less exhausted. (*Body size is more relevant to outdoor biking than indoor biking, because the heavy person is moving that heavier body through space on a regular bike, but not so much on an indoor bike.)

This reasoning is also part of the caution around using a HRM for calorie estimation. It will give the untrained person more calorie credit at the same body size, etc., for the same activity, as it gives the trained person. That's not really accurate. Heart rate also goes up (for the same work) in hot weather, when the wearer is dehydrated, when strain is involved (as in weight training), and more, even though none of those things increase calorie burn. In less trained people doing interval training, their heart rate stays high during the rest/slow part of the intervals, leading to a calorie over-estimate compared to the trained person, whose heart rate may drop like a rock in the rest/slow segments. (It's still less accurate during interval work for the trained person than it would be during steady state, but the differential is less.)

This is a little oversimplified (for example, the trained person likely has a lower resting HR, and if the HRM knows that, that will affect calculations), but the overall idea should still hold.

Exercise with objective measures of "work" (such as a bike with a well-calibrated power meter, or some rowing machines, or even walks/runs of known elevation variation) lend themselves to more accurate calorie estimates. Things like calisthenics or aerobic dance, with no objective measures, are much harder to estimate accurately, let alone things like gardening or carpentry.

Here's the thing: For most of us, calorie estimating accuracy doesn't really matter as much as calorie estimating consistency. If we tend to do the same type of exercise repeatedly, and estimate it as "X minutes of vigorous (whatever)", and faithfully log that and our eating, then adjust our calorie goal based on actual weight loss results, everything will likely work out fine. Some of this reasoning is behind the "eat back 50% of exercise calories at first until you see the results" kind of thinking.