Heart Rate Monitor Polar OH1

A lot will depend on what exercise you use it for.
Calorie estimates will vary wildly if you are using it or an exercise where HR is a reasonable indicator of energy used, in the right kind of intensity range plus your own personal exercise HR and how close that is to average.

A moderately fit person doing a mostly moderate and quite steady cardio exercise could well be quite accurate - or at least reasonable enough to be useful.

What is your exercise of choice? Do you really want/need to know your HR?

There may be a better way and/or free way to get a decent estimate.

Generally speaking HRMs are next to useless for estimating calories expended doing weight lifting (heart rate data may be interesting to track over time as a metric of improving fitness) and only a little better when it comes to steady state cardio. They measure heart rate & time and try to extrapolate from that (at least with a GPS enabled unit you can also get distance and pace which improve the accuracy of the estimate immeasurably) One of the problems with many HRMs is that they correlate heart rate with energy expenditure when such a correlation does not exist (2 people of the same mass running the same distance will expend almost identical amounts of energy but most HRMs would incorrectly assume that a less fit person with a higher heart rate expended significantly more than the fitter runner)

Bealey2011 wrote: »

Well currently going gym 3 days a week (will build it up throughout this month to do 5 days by end of month). I have no body strength but have started stronglifts 5x5 (last week first week of doing it) although I only used the bar with no weights (20kg bar) and for the bench press I used 6kg dumbells and for the overhead press I used a lighter bar with 5kg on each side....I'm going to add 2.5kg each side to the 20kg bar tonight and try 8kg dumbells for bench press. Once I've done workout a or b I then go on the treadmill and walk for 30 minutes at 6mph on an incline of 10.

I'm not very fit and have recently gave up smoking so I'm trying to build my stamina up.

Sorry for the essay and thank you for your response.

A HRM is absolutely useless for calorie estimates for strength training and knowing your heart rate during strength training isn't required or really helpful.
Simply search for the strength training option (under the cadiovascular section of your exercise diary) and it will give you a very rough estimate based on duration of your workout and your weight. It's surprisingly low amount of calories unfortunately.

It might be reasonable to use a HRM for your treadmill session - but so might the treadmill estimate itself (and it's free!).
Beware that "not being fit" and a recent ex-smoker may well mean your HR is higher than average for the work you are doing, that skews the calorie estimate.

Well done on giving up smoking and your fitness ambitions, two great moves to improve your health now and for the future. :flowerforyou: