Excersize

nossmf wrote: »

Crutches support a portion of your bodyweight.

A walker helps maintain balance, while your own muscles support all of your bodyweight.

Personally, I would just log it as walking.

To be honest, a walker helps support bodyweight, just like crutches. I doubt it makes much difference in calories burned but I would consider movement with crutches or a walker similar.


Summary from article linked below:
A walker can make it easier to get around after surgery or after a bone break in your foot or leg. A walker also can help if you have balance problems, arthritis, leg weakness or leg instability. A walker allows you to keep weight off your feet and legs as you move.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/healthy-aging/in-depth/walker/art-20546805

Bear with me for a second, for some background?

Under the covers, MFP uses something called "Metabolic Equivalents (METS)" to estimate exercise calories. In brief, researchers have studied a huge range of activities, and have come up with a way to estimate exercise by using a person's body weight, and multiplying it by a factor that relates to the calorie-burning intensity of that activity on a per-pound basis, with the amount of time the thing is done also part of the estimating method. It's not perfect. It's an estimate. It works better for some things than others.

That said:

At least for older adults, walking with a cane, a standard walker, or a wheeled walker are generically estimated to be 3.5 METS activities, i.e., very similar in calorie burn. That's somewhere between casual strolling at less than 1.0mph on a flat surface (3.0 METS) and walking casually at around 1.0-1.9mph on a firm surface (4.0 METS).

Is that a precision thing? No. But it's a way to get a probably non-crazy estimate.

How?

Get a METS number, like that 3.5 METS thing. I got that 3.5 estimate here, in the older adult section of the Compendium of Physical Activities, a site that compiles METS estimates from varied research sources:

https://pacompendium.com/older-adult-compendium/

The more general compendium, not just older adult stuff, is here:

https://pacompendium.com/

How to use that to get an estimate?

Find a METS calculator that lets you specify the METS number, and plug in the values it asks for. Here's an example:

https://ergo.human.cornell.edu/MetsCaloriesCalculator/MetsCaloriesCalculator.htm

You can then use that calorie value to override a calorie estimate for one of the similar MFP exercise entries, or you can create your own custom exercise in MFP with that value. If you create a exercise, MFP will implicitly pick up on the METS number you used, so that next time you use your custom exercise, MFP will use the new number of minutes you input then along with your then-current body weight in your MFP profile, and do the math for you, so you don't have to go back to the outside METS calculator every time.

Remember: It's just an estimate!

I walk on forearm crutches - have all my life - and I looked up the calorie burn for walking with crutches, and for the weight I was at the time, it was around 500 calories per hour burned. I checked several sources, and they all were about the same. Walking on crutches is much more effort, you are lifting your entire body weight with each step. I walked about an hour a day every other day, didn't change my eating habits, and lost 2 pants sizes in the first 4 months; the first summer I walked. By the end of the next summer, I had lost a total of 5 pants sizes (around 50-60 lbs - it is hard for me to weigh on a normal scale, so based on body measurements and size, the Dr. felt I had lost this amount of weight). I walker doesn't involve using your arms nearly as much. It is for balance mostly, so it wouldn't be the same calorie burn as using crutches.