Heart Rate monitors and calories
Alex S
Question:
Asked by Alex S - 4 answers - 3 years 47 weeks ago
Heart Rate monitors and calories
How accurate are HR monitors and calculating cals burnt during exercise?
casing point. Today I exercised for an hour with an average HRmax of 76% and burnt (according to my watch) a total of 790 cals.
Yesterday, again for an hour my average HRmax was 76% and burnt (according to my watch) a total of 763 cals.
I know you should only take these measurements as a guide, but how good a guide are they?
If you set your HR Monitor to know your age, sex, weight and training status it should be pretty accurate since they test thousands of people on these guidelines and accurately work out how many calories they have burnt.
Exercising at 76% is pretty tough so 760 cals oes not sould too bad. Perhaps you have not set your limits correctly if this felt too easy. 76% for 1 hour is almost threshold pace so you should ahve been working pretty hard.
Top cyclists cycle at 80% and struggle to do more than 90min! Runners do even less.
thats the thing. i guess the HR monitor does 220-age to get HR%, so if its says i am working at 76% HRmax, then thats what i am doing (although i agree that 220-age is not the best way to work out HR training zones)
Not so reliable,Because the monitor and the machine you are training , dont know your body limits and how fit you are.It's an average estimation.
I would just like to but in a second.
1) what sort of heart rate monitor are you using? I have very reccently purchased the polar rs800g3 which is the dogs gonads of HRM's.
It asks you your VO2 max, age, height, MHR, weight and maybe one or two other factors.
These all contribute to working out your cal output. The G3 Unit tells you how far and fast you have ran/cycled etc.
So, so long as you give the correct information you can rest assured that you are very close to your actual expenditure.
2) Of these calories, how many were CHO, fat and protein calories ??? There is a machine that can tell you, however they cost a lot of money. It suffices me to say that if you were training in your "fat burning" zone then a high proportion (exact percentage i don't know) will be fat cells.
Sermon over.