Bowflex max trainer is way to hard! Is something wrong?

Machines tend to overestimate everything. Wearing a Heart rate monitor while you train will give you a better idea of your actual burn.

I’m with you Veganvibess. Max is no gentlemen. Just burning 100 calories in the 14 minutes is a workout. Starting don’t focus on the calories just know you got a good cardio workout. But, DO keep a close eye on your heart rate! It’s easy to max out (no pun intended ). Gradually you’ll build up resistance and speed to hit higher numbers.

I got a Max5 for Christmas. I can tell Max and I are going to have a love/hate relationship. You did better than me. I burned 25 calories in 10 minutes, my first day.

I have one and I put it at a 7 resistance level. I love it! There is a good YouTube video by Bowflex that takes you through a workout. It really helped me. And, yes, use the heart rate monitor included.

I used one a few days ago. I lasted about 5 minutes on a hard setting and thought I was dying. My cardio sucks, so my result might not be typical.

Veganvibesss wrote: »

It says it burns 2.5 the calories of an elliptical but when I use the elliptical at the gym for 10 minutes I burn over 100 calories and haven't even broke a sweat and then using the bowflex I'm legit dying at 10 minutes and only burned like not even 70 calories ....
Am I doing something wrong?
Is it this hard for you guys? It's way harder then the elliptacal and says it burns way less .....

Machines lie (and heart rate monitors/fitness trackers are machines). Well, no, that's unfair: But they do often estimate very poorly.

Based on personal experience, I'm very, very skeptical that 10 minutes on the elliptical burns 100 calories when you "haven't even broke a sweat". That's a probable, almost certain, overestimate.

Some machines estimate net calories (additional calories from the exercise, above and beyond basal metabolic rate (BMR) + daily life standing up kind of calories), whereas other machines estimate gross calories (the exercise burn plus BMR + daily life calories).

That can be a material difference, and either one can be doing the estimate incorrectly, still. If the machine doesn't know your weight or age, it can't remotely assess gross calories. If the machine doesn't know your weight, but the exercise involves moving your body through space (like running), then the machine can't reasonably assess net calories or gross calories. If the exercise mostly involves inputting energy into some mechanism (such as cycling, rowing) then the machine can potentially assess applied power (watts), which translates pretty well into calories. However, if the exercise is technical (like rowing), the machine is only assessing applied power, not wasted energy; people with poor technique waste lots of energy, so they could actually burn more calories than the machine estimates (though fewer calories than they could burn if they did it more technically correctly). So, the machine capability part is complicated, and there's more to it than just the stuff I mentioned.

It's a vast oversimplification, but let's say there are two general types of exercise: Things where calorie burn mostly comes from moving your body fast/energetically, and things where the calorie burn mostly comes from resistance. (Most actual exercises combine those two in some way.) Either of those things can feel like "hard work", and which feels the hardest might depend on how it challenges a person's current physical capabilities, which differs by person. Another major oversimplification: On a per-minute basis, very hard-feeling fast movement (like low-resistance cardio) usually burns more calories than very hard-feeling resistance exercise (like lifting heavy weights). So, if the elliptical and Bowflex differ dramatically in the extent to which speedy movement vs. resistance is involved, then the calorie differences may not align with the perceived-effort differences.

Heart rate monitors, generally, are poor at estimating calories for resistance exercises, or interval exercises, so that's not the perfect solution, either. Fitness trackers that know what activity you're doing may theoretically have the potential to make better estimates, but whether their estimates really are better depends on the quality of the algorithms the programmers wrote, and the quality of the research data they based them on, so that's not a sure thing, either.

What I'd suggest is that for some exercise you do repeatedly, you look at the machine, any tracker or heart rate monitor you may have, other online calculators (they exist for some exercises), and the MFP database's METS-based estimate, and pick the lowest one, unless you have a concrete reason to believe one is more accurate than the others. ("Everyone says the MFP database is inaccurate." is not really a great reason, IMO, BTW. For sure, it's better for some things than others, and seems suspiciously high for some. I use its estimate for strength training & stretching, though, because I have nothing better.)

I know, this sound dismal, but be consistent and conservative in how you estimate your exercise, and adjust your calorie intake if needed after 4-6 weeks of careful logging, and you'll lose weight just fine. Lots of us do.

Best wishes!