Do active rests count in exercise time?

I wouldn't. I mean 16 or 20 minutes of Tabata won't make a whole lot of difference.

Do it one way or the other consistently, see how your weight management goes. There are lots of ways to make errors especially when trying to estimate exercise calories, this is just one of them. Your heart rate is going to stay pretty high in those rest breaks. Track consistently for 4-6 weeks and then adjust after you have accumulated the trending data.

sgt1372 wrote: »

What's an "active" rest?

IMO, either you're resting or working and, if you're resting, it doesn't "count" for anything.

I don't know what the heck OP means, but active rest (a.k.a. active recovery) is a common idea.

If I do classic Tabata intervals on the rowing machine, it's eight times (20 seconds max effort, 10 seconds easy effort), plus WU and CD of course. The easy effort bits would be "active rest" - still rowing. More generically, "active rest" or "active recovery" means you keep moving in some way, like stretching, walking or whatever; as opposed to actual rest, which would be standing or sitting, doing nothing.

OP, cmriverside is right: The difference in calorie burn with a workout that short isn't worth worrying over. If you log your exercise consistently, and log your eating, and monitor results, it'll sort itself out. It's a tiny percentage of your all-day calorie burn. I assume you're probably doing some of the newfangled calisthenics or circuirt or "functional fitness" Tabata. Just log the time as calisthenics or circuit training, it'll be fine.

When it comes to burning calories, your body doesn't care how intense the exercise feels to you, it only cares how much energy you're expending. There is a certain correlation between exertion and calorie burn, but it breaks apart the higher the intensity because if you can't continue at the same pace you aren't burning as many calories.

When I started running, I had to start with intervals. I could burn more calories incline walking and didn't feel wiped out afterward as I did after my interval running sessions. My calories were basically running minutes + walking recovery minutes. Calories wouldn't be as easy to calculate for a Youtube type workout because there isn't a reliable formula for those.

What are your goals? Are you aiming to increase fitness through these workouts? If so, continue doing them and simply log them as 16 minutes of moderate aerobics, circuits, or calisthenics, depending on the nature of these workouts. The difference between 16 and 20 minutes isn't really that significant and MFP tends to over-estimate aerobics calories anyway. You can always adjust later if you're losing more/less than expected.

If your goal is calorie burn, then you may want to rethink your exercise strategy. The exercise that will give you the best calorie burn is the one that has you exercising at the highest intensity reliably sustainable for the period of time you wish to dedicate for a workout. Example: if you want to exercise for 30 minutes, but you go so hard that you wipe out within 5 or 10 minutes, that's not the best calorie output for you. Similarly, if you finish 30 minutes feeling like you could have gone harder, that's not the best output. It takes a bit of trial and error and experimenting to get close to your best calorie burn potential.