Reply With QuoteI do an hour of HIIT and burn around 600 calories I think so this definitely sound strange unless your on the rower for 8 hours!Originally Posted by solwisesteve
So can anyone explain these to me please?
e.g. my rower said this morning I burned 3700 calories! I've correctly told it my body details (weight/height/age/sex) and this is the answer it gave. Every day is pretty much the same c. 3000+ calories burnt.
Now it doesn't take a genius for me to know this is total 'dangly-bits'. If it WAS true then I'd effectively be living on net zero calories a day (under the assumption c. 2500 calories a day eating).
So where does this figure of 3700 calories come from? btw it's not just this rower... I've had similar unbelievable figures in the past from an elliptical trainer and also treadmills and they all give stupid values.
On the same lines... is there an accurate tool/system for measuring the real calories burnt in a gym workout?
I do an hour of HIIT and burn around 600 calories I think so this definitely sound strange unless your on the rower for 8 hours!
I am watching my Fit-bit guesstimate on calories burned with interest, I t tells me i do 3,500 - 4,000 day and I set the goal as 3,500, along with 120 active minutes and minimum 15,000 steps and if I do all that with my daily weights tone-up routine then that is about 4,000 calories, which seems right to me and based on what I eat it is about that. The Fit-bit site gives a fairly broad answer to how they estimate the burn but it seems to make sense.
Why do you think it is not accurate is the first question? Do you think you are eating less than that?
Yes... eating less.... maybe I'm not eating less but certainly I can't believe I'm eating more then 3000 calories a day. I mean the internet tells me the average daily male consumption (sans an hour on a rower) is 2500kcal so I'd need to be taking in something like 6000kcal a day (so that's 2500 + 35000) to stay at steady weight. If I was eating 3000kcal a day but burning 3000kcal on the rower each am I'd be loosing weight like nobodies business... wouldn't I?
So how do you calculate the 600kcal?
That's estimated by British Military Fitness based on their average session (they actually say between 400 - 800 and I'm in the intermediate group). I've just got a Vivoactive 3 so will be seeing if that's accurate.
On Sunday, When I last trained, my Garmin shows 3887 calories burned for the day.
Last edited by dougair; 4th January 2018 at 10:50.
Although the 400-800 sounds a much more believable figure, I'd like to know how BMF arrive at that.
The garmin web site says the Vivoactive can be configured for the type of exercise your doing... I'd be VERY interested on you findings for a particular training session i.e. does it agree with BMF.
Pretty well you need to burn what you eat so basically you must be burning close to 3000/day so eating 3000/day unless I am missing something? I can easily see when I am eating less that I am burning as I can lose weight quickly, enough to see it over a week for example. Also of course I can do the reverse and especially mid winter tend to tack on 3-4 extra kg against the cold but that takes quite a bit of eating to stack on and keep on.
Not sure if you have actually reviewed what you eat and what it is "worth" calorie wise but when I did it seemed to balance out for me against the estimates burning during the day exercise/non-exercise all taken into account via the Fit-bit HR/activity measurements and APP.
I have heard that some fitness equipment is set up to calculate total energy expenditure; ie, it'll add on your base calorie expenditure of approx. 2500/day or Cal's/hour, so as to flatter us. So if yours is set up per day, maybe you need to knock off the base calorie expenditure and the balance is what you've burnt off? But even so approx. 1200 Cal's would likely be an approx. 2 hour stint on a rower.
For the record 1lb body fat = approx. 3500 Cal's burnt, so you'd be shedding about 7 1/2 a week based on the treadmills quoted energy expenditure if you were eating pretty averagely. Not a healthy weight loss, but then not looking like its accurate. If it is as my example above that would equate to nearer 2lb a week which would be good.
Either way, keep up the good work.
I can't believe it's adding on my 'typical' daily calorie burn. If it was then the counter would start at 2500 and it doesn't - it starts at zero and increments as the exercise proceeds.
Doing some 'net research seems to say if you do daily exercise then I need c. 2900 a day to maintain weight. Interesting to note that if I say I'm doing only one exercise workout a week that knocks it down by only 600kcal a day. So working out each day seems to be c. 600kcal.
Just been to another one of these calorie calculating web sites and it say 45mins vigorous rowing is about 600kcal..... btw it also says c. 270kcal for washing your car and about 270kcal for 8 hours sleep. There were also boxes were you could input details of sex (broken down into foreplay and intercourse) being married for nearly 20 years I put zero mins in both of those boxes ;-)
My rowing machine has a calorie counter, I row most days at a moderate pace for 30 mins and do about 520 strokes, cover about 4.6km and burn between 260 and 280 calories depending how much effort I put in! An hours rowing is pretty much double all this figures.
I'm doing over 2K strokes in 50mins (c. 14Km) so a rough figure up would perhaps give a figure of c. 1200kcal. tbh I can believe that.... maybe the 'calculator' in the rower is just crap! Do you need one of the those heart rate monitors that link to the rower to get a more accurate answer? Heck it can't be that hard can it for the rowing machine to work out the energy put into the rower and then do a rough 'real' body figure from that?
Most likely, or purposefully over inflated figures to encourage people to use it. Image you use all the equipment in the gym for 20 mins each - but one device in particular seems to burn a lot more calories. Device becomes most popular and gyms buy more. It's not made by VW is it?
I find it hard going to get over 600 calories an hour on my concept 2
Maybe this will help
http://www.concept2.com/indoor-rower...rie-calculator
I've been reading the instructions for the rower and it says something about EN957 calibration for power/WATTS. It also says that you can check the calibration by doing a test of 25spm at a measured distance of 1m per stroke (that's true per stroke distance, not sure how you measure that - I suppose marks on the pull rope/tape) and at a VERY high resistance setting which, I admit, I'm not sure I can pull at the level it asks for. This should give a value of 100 WATTS on average. I might try that.
Its an interesting situation, I tend to take these as indicators rather than fact as there seem to be quite a few variables that impact the numbers.
I use a concept2 rower at the gym and that gives me between 310 - 340 calories spent for a 30 min row.
I also track heart rate with a Garmin vivosmart hr+ which gives me between 90 - 350 for the same row, its extremely fussy on wrist placement and would often under read until I started to change the position and move it up the wrist.
If I just put duration into my fitness pal (MFP) thats about 390 cals.
I also have a mio optical heart rate sensor that I use from time to time to check against my Garmin
Nothing seems to be perfect, I suspect that a electrical chest HRM would be more accurate but I've gotten to my limit of interest now that I track calorie intake via my fitness pal and steps and HR with the Garmin.
Yesterday was:
Cal in - 1550
Cal out - 3200 (25 min row - 280, 8K steps - 2.9K)
I'll see how the weight loss goes through the rest of the month as I'm not sure that the step to cal figures are correct, there seems to be a fudge on how Garmin reports to MFP
(Garmin thinks overall I used 5.7K, MFP expected 3K with the workout and so the balance is applied to the step figure..)
It can, I've only had it a week and have not got as far as configuring for HIIT. I'm also interested to see the results...although it certainly feels like a tough workout!
Good lord so you have minus 1500 odd calories.... keep that up and you'll soon have the lbs off!
Just paid £18 in the sale for chest strap heart rate monitor for my rower.
There does seem to be huge discrepancies in the values reported by the various methods. It also looks like, for my rower, the calculated values might be very dependant upon the rowing technique. Certainly I've noticed a difference in the values shown between longer pulls (that seem to result in lower kcal figures) and short pulls (that give a higher figure); I find I tend to do longer pulls at a lower resistance setting.
Out of curiosity what rower are you using?
https://www.powerhouse-fitness.co.uk...ine-by-bodymax
I'm no expert but understand the basics so here's my thoughts.
Equipment Calories are usually a unit of energy or work done based on the machines own internal calibration.
This is not likely to be a calculation based on your specific inputs of weight, height etc...
I suspect the BMF figure of 400-800 per hour/per session is based on actual calculated calories burned from recorded HR data from some past customers. I've seen similar claims from CrossFit & other HIIT type classes.
BMR or Basal Metabloic Rate causes a lot of the confusion.
In my case my BMR is circa 1800*, as such lying in bed 24/7 would still use 75cals per hour just to stay alive.
*It's probably a bit lower than this but lest keep the maths simple.
That's the one I have, I have the chest strap heart rate monitor but gave up using it as it's a bit of a faff to get it reading correctly. It tended to lose contact halfway through a session thereby invalidating any results.
So what's your opinion of the calorie calculator?
Did 3200 calories this morning... apparently.
I tried the calibration checking procedure last night... no chance. Impossible to keep it spot on 25spm and 25m/min and look at the WATTS dial at the same time.
The chest strap was on half price special offer so I thought it worth a gamble. I tried one of these on a treadmill years ago and, like you, found it a bit iffy. I kinda hoped technology might have improved - maybe not :-(
I've never had a problem with the calorie counter on mine, if anything I'd say it gives a conservative reading. The monitor works better if you wet it under the tap before putting it on but it was usually hit and miss as to whether the connection would last the session or not. Not wearing it means I don't use any of the programs that rely on the heart rate info but I didn't anyway. The bodymax is a fantastic machine, when we went on holiday last year we used the hotels gym and they had a couple of concept2's. I thought they were broken as even with them cranked up to the max they offered nowhere near the resistance that the bodymax does, I'd say the max setting on a concept2 is about a 50% setting on the bodymax.
Ref. the concept2 I'd 100% agree. I've also tried one at a hotel gym and, after spending several mins trying to find out how the heck to control the resistance (why is this not electronically controlled?), found I had to set it to 100% to come even slightly close to the level I normal use at home.
Maybe the calorie thing is broken then on mine :-( I've had it c. 4 years but, tbh, I think it's always given these daft values but I might be wrong.
Definitely sounds like the count is wrong, just over 26 mins on the concept2 today gave me 301 cals on the rower and my Garmin read 297, close enough for me.
Is it worth considering a cheaper optical hrm to use as a control?
A friend of mine sells these on Amazon and I tested one against my Garmin and it was close enough based on the price.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/NAPPERBAND-...rds=napperband
I usually wear a FitBit when I'm exercising and I find most gym machines are about 10 to 20% more optimistic on calorie burn than the Fitbit. I think the Fitbit is itself a bit optimistic as I need a fairly substantial calorie deficit on it to actually lose weight. 3000 calories in an hour I don't think is feasible even for an elite athlete, I think that's so far out there's probably a fault in your rower.
Sent from my iPad using TZ-UK mobile app
Purchased... :-)
You've got me thinking about how much calories it's possible to burn. This was helpful - http://https://www.active.com/cycling/articles/infographic-how-many-calories-does-an-endurance-athlete-burn?page=1
This is interesting, I ran an 8.5k loop this morning at an average pace of 4’58” per km (~41 mins) and my (Apple Watch tracked) Nike+ app shows an estimated 421 calories burnt (average HR of 171 bpm) , hence 2.9k for 8k steps seems high. Having also wandered round York I’ve done a total of 13.5k steps today (13.15 km) and to date have burnt 704 calories in total (run and steps combined).
For additional reference a 1 hour intense PT session with my trainer will burn between 600-800 calories depending on how hard he pushes.
It’s what I thought, I suspect it is adding the steps calories to the BMR I’m going to check that out when I have some time.
Heres a question...
What do you do with the data?
RIAC
Well nothing really but it makes me feel better and it stops me thinking 'oh I'll have that mars bar because I did x thousand calories on the rower this morning' ;-)
Okay new Vivoactive tried out for the first time this am. Chose this particular tracker because it's one of the few that actually understands rowing as an exercise; most of the others are more orientated to walking/running/cycling.
Anyway first try out this am and bang on results :-) Well certainly results I can believe. The HR was bang what I expected i.e. agreed with the rowing machine monitor and was pretty much what I set as 'my target' (85% maximum). The 'strokes' was within a couple of what the rower said AND the 'calories' was 647 i.e. a MUCH more believable figure (the rower said 3K again).
So a good result...and £170 poorer :-(
As an aside I've started using a HR strap for the rower and it actually works quite well and the capability on the rower to dynamically change the resistance in order to keep the HR at optimum is really good; I like it. I suppose this is something you can't do with a Concept 2 because of it's manmatic setting of the resistance load.
Having trained for 30+ years almost daily and been at a very competitive level in a few sports I was guilty of having every gadget to measure things known. Indeed before gadgets we used the Rob Sleamaker ‘Serious’ program and plotted and charted our training year on year into books.
These days I just go. No watches, Garmins, data just exercise and on the diet front (which achieves around 80% of the weight management) I abide by the ‘if it swims, flys or grows in the earth it’s good for you’
You don’t gain or lose weight from exercising or not and whilst your step and calories counted are riveting conversation and Facebook posts its what you eat. Simple.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
RIAC
So no mars bars then? :-) Though, tbh, it must be months since I had a mars bar!
Yes I agree if watching/loosing weight then it's more important to look at what you eat rather than exercise. When I did my big weight loosing thing a few years ago I lost 5 stone by dieting and only then started the exercise thing so AFTER loosing the weight.
In 2015 I went from a very active job to sitting on my arse all day, that's when I started exercising every day. I've eaten reasonably healthily for a lot longer!
As above.
'Calories' are literally measures of the energy given off by burning food in a bomb calorimeter. That is not how macronutrients are metabolised in the body. So although the calorie content we show on food is almost certainly accurate (if the food was burnt) it's hard to imagine that number will have any correlation with what happens in the body.
The honest answer to the question of calories in versus calories expended is "we don't know". Dig deeply enough and you'll find experts haranguing each other over what is right and wrong, and meta-analyses proving this, that and the other. We don't know.
An interesting comparison is here
A guy does an experiment comparing three diets. He spends 21 days on each, (over!)eating 5,000 calories a day for those 21 days, and recovering to baseline weight between each diet. If "a calorie is a calorie" all the diets should perform the same - but in fact they give radically different results.
You can find all of his individual diaries and summaries by searching his name (Sam Feltham) on Youtube, but a summary is here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHbN7iqzhO8
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