MFP vs gym calories burned

Yea I noticed the same thing! I just stick with the machine since I put my age and weight in as well..

Hi guys, so I know there's a lot of discussion on here about how MFP overestimates burns, but I seem to have it the other way around for some reason! For instance, I'll cycle 18 miles on a stationary bike and it gives me 650 cals burned (this is having put in my age and weight into the gym equipment - hopefully making it accurate?), then I'll come home and put in 45 mins vigorous cycling on MFP and it gives me something in the 400s...so which should I use?

While working out it's really motivational to watch those numbers going up on the machine, but then I'll get home and see that I only burned less than 2/3 of what I thought I did

Anyone else have this problem? Which number do you use?

Neither is going to be accurate unless you happen to be expending the same effort as the reference person the calorie burn is based on.

Machines seem to read high as encouragement to keep using them, even though they could be about as accurate as you could get, since they know exactly how many watts is being used, and that is energy, and that is calories.

But none of the machines, even if they will display the HR for you, actually use it in their calc's.

Might try this too if you know how many watts were done on avg. This is highly accurate. As is the walk/run calc there too.

http://www.exrx.net/Calculators/CycleMechMETs.html

This way, if you want to bun so many calories in so much time, you can fiddle with the watts to see what you would need to get, and then try to hit that goal.

i go with the machine because i enter weight and age. when i add cals burnt, mfp always thinks i've done more!
only way you'll get an accurate result is with a hrm