Entering your rides in MFP
bjc101
Posts: 25 Member
Has anyone done or know of a good way of tracking calories burned while riding? It seems the MFP recording of riding as a cardio exercise is quite generous in calories burned. Today I did a 16 mile ride in 70 minutes. If I entered the full ride, that gives me 860 calories burned. To me that seems extreme. I've generally been adding about 3/4's of the time of my actual ride, to compensate for coasting or other times I can't keep up a good peddling cadence. Any thoughts or comments?
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I use a Heart Rate Monitor. I've had times were MFP was higher & lower than my HRM showed so I edit my calories burned.0
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Heart rate monitor is the most accurate. I'm using Wahoo fitness stuff with my iphone. I have the heartrate monitor, and the speed and cadence sensor. The sensor has made a difference in the way I ride. It's not terribly inexpensive, but I think it's worth it for me.0
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i just use mountain biking... it feels right considering how hard i push0
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I use an HRM on longer rides. Shorter stuff, eg. Commutes - I took an HRM reading a few times to begin with but actually found that MFP gets it pretty close. You probably burn more than you would expect, particularly if you are quite heavy but go at a reasonable speed!0
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+1 for the HRM, although I used endomondo for the first time recently and it's calorie estimate was within 50 cals of the HRM, pretty good!0
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I use the excellent Cyclemeter iPHONE app. Cyclemeter and Internet calculators I compared all seem to calculate about 1000 calories/hour at between 16-18mph. MFP calculates a bit higher than this.0
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My estimation is that Cyclemeter app on iPhone is pretty close, when it comes to distance traveled and calories burnt. I have been using it for more than a quarter now. Its pretty useful.0
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These are fine recommendations, but...
What if you are mountain biking through soup (mud, snow, trees, water, etc) and take a beta blocker?
I guess a lot and compare it to known work outs on a LifeFitness cycle.
FYI - for those not familiar, a beta blocker acts to slow your HR down. My current resting HR is 40 (yes physician knows and is OK with it -and more importantly I am asymptomatic) and I rarely can get my HR above 120 while cycling or running.0 -
Many thanks for all the great suggestions!0
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I believe there's simply no way to truly know my calorie burn. MFP is all over the map, all the HRM's I've used over the years are all over the map, charts and graphs tell me nothing worthwhile... So for me, calories burned is basically an arbitrary number that I can use to gauge against other workout cals burned, but not much else. If you're trying hard to stay in the MFP calories in/out formulas, I think you're probably doing the smartest thing possible by going down a bit. Maybe you can gauge your calories in/out vs/ your day-after weight, and see how that all correlates.
Sorry, I doubt this is the answer you're looking for.0 -
HRM's probably the nearest cost-effective way to get an approximation of your calory burn - you'll get closer with a power meter of course - and that could well be the only way @chuckmcm would get some sort of sensible idea - something like a cycleops rear wheel and either the Joule or a garmin 500 for the readout / hrm part of the equation. As it's measuring ACTUAL power development at the rear wheel (via the torque put through the drive system) then it knows how hard you're working. This information, coupled with a decent measure of your heart rate SHOULD make things accurate enough.
Of course, not everyone fancies lashing out £1k on this kind of stuff. For me, it's pretty much akin to hiring an accountant to tell me I'm already bankrupt. I'm not fit enough to get that kind of value out of it.
Another option would be to use one of the recent Garmin HR/GPS units, and use it, in combination with the "New Leaf" testing calibration - apparently they do a proper physiological workup on you, and use this data to "fine tune" the calculation model of the Garmin's calorie burn routines. I can't say how accurate this is, as when I last looked on the new leaf website a couple of months ago, there wasn't anywhere local to me (well - nowhere within 500 miles!) to try it out.
At the moment, I use a Garmin 705, and run the data files through Sportstracks3 - using a couple of plugins which calculate a reasonable approximation of power development (and hence calorific use).
These plugins take into account :-
The route ridden - from a GPS log, gives a elevation profile and route outline - which come in useful in the next couple of lines...
Elevation (obviously, gives gradient up/down)
weather conditions (headwinds = lots of watts needed = more calories burned, wind direction/strength downloaded and applied to the route ridden),
heart rate (obviously, if you're beating fast, you're working hard),
Cadence (so if you're not pedalling, even if you're doing 40mph into a headwind - you're not working! = only BMR calories!)
my weight (auto downloaded from my Withings scales) - heavier you are, more drag from wind resistance and more work to overcome gravity on uphills),
the bike weight and drag from the tyres etc. (23c slicks less rolling resistance than 43c 'cross tyres for example)
Over the last month I've been using these plugins, and they have generally calculated burns of -10% to -40% compared to the direct Garmin readings. As the variables have been optimised to the conditions and my weight/size, I feel far more confident in using these figures than the "raw" Garmin data. I've read a number of articles/blog posts where people have said that on changing from a Polar HRM to a Garmin the calorie burn has seemingly increased massively - between 30-60%... the latest generation Garmin bike computers (500/800) being considerably more accurate than the 705 or 305's0 -
These are fine recommendations, but...
What if you are mountain biking through soup (mud, snow, trees, water, etc) and take a beta blocker?
I guess a lot and compare it to known work outs on a LifeFitness cycle.
FYI - for those not familiar, a beta blocker acts to slow your HR down. My current resting HR is 40 (yes physician knows and is OK with it -and more importantly I am asymptomatic) and I rarely can get my HR above 120 while cycling or running.
I'm Beta blocked too, half of what I was on when I started here last year though. My resting HR is right around 60 most of the time, but it was in the 30s the other day. I was completely asymptomatic as well. I have trouble getting my HR above 140 for any length of time, but I figure, it's still higher than my RHR, which means I am increasing my calorie burn. My HR monitor is paired with the Wahoo Fitness Bike case which is highly water resistant, and darn near bulletproof. I have found that my HRM usually correlates within 50-150 calories of MFP estimates. The important thing is to keep being active.0
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