Tracking Exercise

How are you tracking your exercise?

If you are entering strength training, MFP does not award many calories. There's a few reasons for that, one of which is it's really hard to estimate that, and it really doesn't burn that many. You can, however, record weight training as an aerobic exercise and be awarded calories.

The calories that are affiliated with exercise are estimates, and they can be really close. They can also be less close depending on several factors. It's best to track a few weeks and keep track of whether you are getting the results you'd expect based on logging. Then you can adjust.

Remember to eat back your exercise calories!

dderb2731 wrote: »

Why would my calorie allowance go up if i have lost 20 pounds? Is anyone else having this issue?

Did your base calorie budget go up without you doing anything? There's been a weird glitch. Mine did it twice. I just reset it manually to the number it's supposed to be and then sent a support ticket to the help staff so they would know about it.

Or did you log some exercise? Because obviously that increases your calorie allowance for the day.

Or did you go back through the guided setup? Even if you don't tell it "OK, use that!" if you go through the guided set-up it will usually reset your goal to the number it calculated based on what you input.

markswife892 wrote: »

as far as the research i've done, strength training with weights does not burn many calories while it's being done, however you will burn calories long after your session ends. unlike cardio, where you may burn more DURING your session, but once it's over, no more burn.

i think it's difficult to track calories in/out, but what i've done and found successful is "over logging" on food, such as instead of 10g of olives, i input 12g. and then on exercise, i will "under log" - instead of 30 min of jogging, i put 20 min. HTH

also i agree with one of the previous posts, i always log my strength training in the cardiovascular section of exercise logging on MFP.

edited because i forgot one thought.

The "after-burn" effect is real, but it's much smaller than most people realize.

Why don't you simply log the ACTUAL amount you eat and the ACTUAL amount you exercise, then observe the results and maybe just change the goal instead of logging inaccurately?

markswife892 wrote: »

because i found that the exercise calories on MFP are off. it may show (example) that i burn 400 calories on a bike ride, but if i wear a fitness tracker/watch/HRM, it shows lower.

Both are only estimates. Neither is clearly more correct. Faced with a choice of equally opaque and error-prone estimating methods, I'd normally pick the lowball estimate. But that's out of conservatism, not an assumption of accuracy.

As long as one consistently uses the same exercise estimating method for the same exercise, the math can work out OK in practice even if the estimate is off.

Heart rate isn't an inviolably great estimator of exercise calories. Seems like many people give it too much credit for accuracy, though I'm not saying you're doing that (I don't know.)

Heart rate rises in response to oxygen demand from exercise, and oxygen demand from exercise correlates to some extent with calorie expenditure.

But heart rate can mislead calorie estimates, sometimes significantly. Why? HR also rises in warm ambient temperatures, when experiencing certain strong emotions, when relatively dehydrated (not necessarily dangerously so), or when there's intra-body pressure (as in weight training), and more. Those things can distort the calorie estimate: None of those increase calorie expenditure as much as they may increase heart rate.

Different people - or even the same person at different stages of fitness - will have a different heart rate response to an exercise that has a measurably equal or near-equal calorie expenditure (such as running a mile at a certain speed on the same course at the same bodyweight). Interval style training creates heart rhythms that lag exercise effort, so calorie estimates for interval training stand a decent chance of being overestimated. On top of that, a sizeable minority of the population have a true maximum heart rate materially different from the age-based HRmax formulas that trackers use (if you don't set them to use a better exercise-tested HRmax).

A power-metered bike can give a decent calorie estimate. The same may be true of a limited range of other machines that can be power-metered, and that have a relatively small efficiency difference between people. Most other exercise calorie estimates are a bit of a cr*pshoot, but can be close enough to work fine in a calorie counting context. Using the same estimating method for a particular exercise form will make that work out better, I think.

ETA P.S. I use the MFP cardiovascular section estimate for "Strength training (weight lifting, weight training)" for regular rep/set type strength training. It includes the effect of normal between-set rests, so one uses the total wall clock time of the steady training session. It more likely tends to lowball, if anything. Some fitness trackers now seem to be using the same researched-based methodology (METS) to estimate strength training now, rather than relying on heart rate.

Also, FWIW, I agree with @mtaratoot about the "afterburn" issue. Strength training has a dramatically higher percent, but it's a big percent of a small number. Once you do the math to figure out the actual numeric calorie impact, it's kind of underwhelming.