Measuring Calories from Strength Workouts

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den_panda
den_panda Posts: 9 Member
in Fitness and Exercise
Hello, how do you count the calories you burned from strength training like abdominal crunches, squats, lower body or upper body workouts? Thank you.

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  • Lietchi
    Lietchi Posts: 6,116 Member
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    Use the 'strength training (weight lifting, weight training)' entry in the Cardiovascular section for adding exercise on MFP.
    It's more likely to be accurate than what activity/fitness trackers tell you based on HRM.
  • AKTipsyCat
    AKTipsyCat Posts: 240 Member
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    You can use the new Build your work out feature, that seems to do a pretty good job, I never really could get it to work for me until they introduced that feature - and since I basically alternate between two work outs, it's pretty to update as I progress in weights.
  • sijomial
    sijomial Posts: 19,811 Member
    edited October 2021
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    FYI - estimating not measuring!

    Like this - note the cardiovascular exercise diary not the strength training diary which has no calorie functionality.
    Whole duration of your workout as significant rest/recovery periods between sets are assumed.

    (If you are doing fast-paced circuit training there's a different entry for that.)
  • Retroguy2000
    Retroguy2000 Posts: 1,514 Member
    edited October 2021
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    According to this, it's 3-6 MET's. You'd burn 1 MET doing nothing, so the additional burn is 2-5 MET's, i.e. 2-5 calories per kg bodyweight per hour. That will depend on how hard you're working, how little rest time you take, whether it's big compound exercises or isolation, and so on.

    MFP's strength training estimate for me is 305 calories for 60 minutes, which equates to additional MET of 3, which sounds appropriate to me.

    https://www.shape.com/fitness/tips/calories-burned-lifting-weights
  • heybales
    heybales Posts: 18,842 Member
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    AKTipsyCat wrote: »
    You can use the new Build your work out feature, that seems to do a pretty good job, I never really could get it to work for me until they introduced that feature - and since I basically alternate between two work outs, it's pretty to update as I progress in weights.

    Unless there has been some changes from last year - this suggested method gives a very inflated calorie burn not related to the database entry that is best estimate.

    Be curious if you could take a past workout and note the calorie burn and duration of workout.
    Then manually start to log it same duration as instructed under Strength Training in database - and see what the suggested calorie burn is. No need to save it just cancel.

    What were the figures?

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