Can you burn 1200+ calories on an Elliptical machine..

You would have to weigh A LOT and go very, very, very fast at a very high level. I don't think anyone with the body mass to do it would be able to use an elliptical.

For an idea, I'm 150 pounds. If I work out in intervals and use a VERY high level and go hard, I can burn about 300 calories in 30 minutes (based on a heart rate monitor with chest strap).

You'd have to really go hard for a long time. A lot more than 30 minutes.

I do the elliptical all the time and MFP WAY overestimates the number of calories burned. I wear an HRM, and the amount it tells me that I'm burning is 1/3 or less of what MFP says, and about half of what the machine says. So while I enter my minutes on MFP, if I ate back the amount of exercise calories it says, I'd gain a couple of pounds a week!

THIS IS VALUBLE INFO AS I WILL TRY TO REMEMBER NOT TO EAT BACK CALORIES-THANK YOU

I vote for "don't trust the machine".

If I run on a treadmill for 1/2 hour near the upper end of my aerobic capacity (around 155 bpm) I burn 600ish calories per my Polar FT4. I weigh 235. I doubt you can burn double that on an elliptical in the same period of time.

MFP said I burned 400 something in the same 30 mins!

400 is a much closer estimate than 1200, but it all depends on how hard you were working and your fitness level. (and therein lies the problem with "eating exercise calories"...without an accurate way to measure them, you could be eating away your entire deficit).

I find MFP and my machine are inline.....an estimate of 250 Calories for a 20 minute workout that has a variety of tensions built in.

Are you sure it wasn't revolutions/distance rather than calories?

10 calories a minute is a safe estimate if you're working hard. I burn, through much testing with HRMs, VO2 rates etc etc.... about 740 cals in an hour on my machine. That being said, to give you an example of how much I'm sweating, my weight is typically 4 lbs less after my workout than right before it. That's LOTS of water I'm wringing out of my clothes afterwards...every piece from the socks on up are completely drenched like I took a bath in my clothes.

-M

It takes me about 70-75 minutes to burn that on the elliptical, even when I weighed 270 and I go hard at it.

Sooooo glad that I found this!

I decided to wear my HRM at the gym for the first time since I started going back a month ago.

I am 205lbs, my workout was week 4 day 3 of C25K (which I was all over the place on MPH during the running portion but basically all in between 4.8 to 5.6 and at 4.0 for walking) and then I did 40 minutes of upper body weights, 8 different exercises.

My HRM says I burned 1238 calories and then MFP says 584.
When I was on the treadmill during walking, I did bring it down to 3.9 a couple of times(because the machine will not go into HRM mode at 4mph or more) and used the HRM on the machine to see if it was the same as what was showing on my HRM and the numbers were exactly the same.

when i was 240 i was burning about 10 calories a min on the elliptical! go with MFP!

I think I get it with the wearing it during weights. I guess it is a *duh* moment there.

I did go with the MFP estimate just because I thought it was a heck of a lot closer to reality. LOL But we will see how it goes tomorrow when I do cardio!

I don't know if that is possible in 30 minutes. You would have to have the resistance level very high and go very fast. We own a gym and I burn about 440 in 40 minutes at a flucuation of resistance between 25 and 30 and that is with my weight entered into the machine. I think the only true way to know is to wear a heart rate monitor. ON MFP I think they rate a lot of the activities high in calories. Not sure though, just my opinion.

I was so disappointed the first time I wore my HRM on the elliptical.

30 minutes the machine said 350. I was working hard, thought that sounded fair. HRM said only 150 :sad:

I've been there!!!

I had a previous HRM that did not show cal burn so I used the online calculator. I was absolutely horrified when I bought a new HRM which gave me the cal burn info of abt 30-40% less than what the online calculator gave me.

The elliptical at my gym keeps track of your heart rate... there's a HRM on it... sooo... I think I'm good? If I'm not, please correct me. I don't want to think differently and be wrong in how much calories I've burned all this time...

And I find that the MFP elliptical measurement is weird... wouldn't it be hard to gauge how much calories you burned if you don't know the speed you ran at the whole time? And yes, I know that elliptical speeds change pretty often depending on your consistency and such through the workout. Another reason why I don't use MFP... Time can't be the only way to measure... I would only trust the actual machine or a gear you wear to record the calories you've burned... not this site.

Unfortunately, with very few exceptions, elliptical cross trainers have unreliable calorie readouts. The fact that the cross trainer has a heart rate readout means nothing--the heart rate display is completely separate from the calorie display.

If you can measure the actual workload of a machine, then heart rate is irrelevant. That's why the machine doesn't require heart rate interaction to estimate calories. That works fine on treadmills and some bikes. However, with cross trainers/ellipticals, there is no standard movement--every brand and often every model within a brand has a different movement. Therefore, there is no common, accurate equation that can be used for all machines --like there is for treadmill and bikes. The only way for a manufacturer to accurately estimate calories burned on an elliptical is to do oxygen uptake validation studies on the equipment and develop their own machine-specific algorithms. That's not easy and it's not cheap. Most manufacturers do not have the resources to do it, nor the desire. It is easier to just copy a calculation from something else and apply it to the cross trainer--who's going to really know? There are only one or two cross trainer models out there that I know give reliable calorie readouts--more accurate than an HRM. But while they come from a big manufacturer, they are not commonly found in most health clubs.

MFP is even worse in that it is using rough averages from a bunch of different machines. So while I often urge that people not place too much faith in HRM calorie readouts, a better-grade model like a Polar, properly set up, is probably going to give the best estimates on most elliptical cross trainers.