Why are my calorie burns so low?

I burn upto and over 700 calories an hour, but I know i do becasue i wear a heart rate monitor!

Do you have one? if so wear it during exercise to get a better and more accurate view of your calorie burn.

Can i also just add that i made a friend wear a HRM one day doing the same exercises as me - she weighs probably 130lb if that and she burnt 825 calories - so no, weight does not always count on the calorie burn!! High intensity exercise gives you the burn!

I find that if I use MFP or the calories given on the equipment I am using, it is a much higher burn than my heart rate monitor. If I take n hour spin class, I burn 375-400 calories in an hour. I weigh 130 pounds and I am 62 years old. I use quite a bit of resistance on the bike and I am quite fit for my age. If I jog for 40 minutes, my heart rate will be between 80-90% of my maximum and again I burn about 350-375 calories. My calorie burn is most often much less than most others on MFP,:grumble: but as long as I am working hard, that's what matters.

I have burned almost 600 in an hour, but I was doing a very intense workout, and it was a definite struggle to finish. I also am a lot heavier than you are, however, so I anticipate that once I lose a bit I will have to do an even harder workout to burn that much in that time. Just don't get discouraged by other people's numbers, try to let that motivate you to keep working at it!

Your friends are either: a) heavier, b) genetically more efficient at burning calories, c) getting higher heart rates by pushing themselves harder, or d) overestimating how many calories they are burning

For those using a HRM, remember that it is only a tool that estimates your calorie burn based on an algorithm using the stats you enter including gender, height, weight, Max HR and VO2 (for Polars). Polars use the standard 220-age for the Max HR. A lot of the times this is not correct and if you hit this number often or exceed it, you need to adjust it manually. Polar's "Fit Test" grossly overestimated my VO2 at one point and my calorie burn was way off! As a middle aged and overweight woman, a VO2 of 48 was crazy! When I manually reset it to what is expected for an average woman my age, the calorie burn was more what I was expecting.

I guess what I am saying is, use your HRMs calorie burn as a reference and let your weight loss, or lack of weight loss, as a guide.

Okay, mine looks like I'm burning about 700 in 45 minutes, doing Aikido. That's because I write down about 45, but ranging from 30-60 minutes depending on perceived intensity of the class, but the class is actually 2 hours long. I guess (and try to underestimate, a bit) the amount of time that we spent actually training hard. So I'm not burning it as fast as it says I am, but it's easier that way than manually entering calories also based on a guess. :P

Adding: Sweat is not really an indicator of effort. Some people sweat a LOT and some don't. Genetically, speaking. I sweat a lot, my daughter doesn't sweat at all, not even a tiny bit. Even doing the same zumba class with me and being very hot and tired, not a drop of sweat on this girl!!

Ah yes, the benefits of bein out of shape! It's not all about weight, your heart rate plays a huge factor too. For instance, my heart rate during a run went down about 15bmp over the course of a week, and so I burned about 60 calories less for that workout even though my weight remained the same.

That's a HRM issue, not a calorie issue. For someone just starting out, there is a period of adaptation to exercise in general. Your first couple of workouts, your body is kind of going "haywire" in response to the exertion and so things like heart rate can fluctuate a great deal. In fact when research studies investigate a new exercise or piece of equipment, they always have the subjects go through a "habituation" period on the equipment, otherwise the data is garbage.

So if you were just starting out, the initial few workout numbers were meaningless because your body had not stabilized.