FORUMS > Cardio Training Forum Rules

How accurate do you think they are?

I can do an easy 20 minutes on an elliptical to warm up and the machine will say I burned 200 calories or so.

Next day I can run for 20 minutes on a treadmill and it will say I burned about 200 calories, even though I've worked a lot harder.

A trainer at my gym says it's total BS. It's not taking enough factors into account to be anywhere near accurate. I started wearing a heart monitor to track calories burned, but apparently even that's not 100% relible.

The cardio machine counters are completely worthless, do not rely on them. Although no measurement that is affordable and able to be taken outside a lab is perfect, a heart rate monitor has been proven in multiple studies to be a good solid reliable indicator of energy expended. Some of the newer high end models are even able to calculate things like VO2 max and come up with very precise measurements of calories burned. But even the more reasonable ones that record heart rate every 5 seconds are very close to accurate. Cardio machines and fitness software have a tendency to be very disproportionate in measuring true energy expenditure.

The only thing I look at on those machines are the timers, and maybe the pulse rate. I have never really been a calorie counter anyway.

I have one of those Polar watches for calorie counting and it always tells a different story to the counter on the machines.

The machines give you a rough idea of how many calories you're burning.

I wouldn't say they're completely worthless. Without using a respirometer it's impossible to precisely measure the number of calories burned during an aerobic workout. Even respirometry will still neglect anaerobic metabolism. The calorie meters on machines probably represent the number of calories that would be metabolized by a typical adult during such a workout and can probably serve as a very rough estimate of the number of calories you have burned during your workout. They may also be useful in comparing the relative number of calories burned by different machines.

Thanks for the great responses. I didn't realize those meters were so unreliable.

What would someone recommend as a good but not super expensive heart monitor that's fairly accurate in calories expended?

I know they're not accurate at all, especially if you don't enter in your weight, etc. But I actually like to use them for goal-setting. For instance, if I'd planned to do a certain intensity for a certain amount of time, I might go a little longer to reach the next rounded calorie goal.

Don't focus on these contraptions that claim to tell you how many calories you're burning. This is a complicated process that can only be determined with the proper medical equipment that measures not only your heart rate but also your oxygen intake and carbon dioxide expelled.

If these tests were affordable I'd love to take one in order to find out the proper target heart rate for me to burn the most fat. But as long as I do 60-65% of my heart rate maximum I do just fine.

If you want exacting science then be prepared to pay for it with a very expensive test performed in hospitals. Just take your pulse manually. It's free and it works. It only takes 10 to 30 seconds to do. If you work at 60% and you're not getting the results you're anticipating then try upping the intensity a bit.

The computer on my expensive(read I'm better than you) rower tells me in not so small black clipped numerical symbols that I burn approximately 700ish calories rowing for 20 minutes at 32 strokes a minute.

I know things about these sorts of things, you would do well to heed my glorious word.

Oh wait accuracy? Uh, doubt it's spot on or anything, but just a general 'Yeah that's right, fuck you double cheese burger!'