Okay, I have a few questions regarding using a Heart Rate Monitor. I have a fairly budget model, but it does have stuff like laps, calories burned, avg rate, etc. My question is, if I'm recording how much exercise I'm doing daily and how many calories burned with that exercise how should I record it. At the moment I'm really concentrating on cardio with my elliptical trainer, so I did 20 mins today and that showed I'd burned 237 calories. Now in a previous post about average cals burned on a ellipital trainer someone mentioned that you are still burned calories until your heart rate gets back to normal. So with this in mind, should I stop recording the amount of calories burned as soon as I finish the exercise, or until my heart rate goes below, say 100 BMP? Keeping the lap timer going until my rate went below 100 and not when I finished the exercise showed 260 instead of 237.

Also, as its related, if I were doing a workout without cardio, just weights/machines etc, how would I record the cals burned. Would I just start a 'lap' on my HRM at the very start of my workout and then take the total cals figure at the end of the workout?

Okay, I have a few questions regarding using a Heart Rate Monitor. I have a fairly budget model, but it does have stuff like laps, calories burned, avg rate, etc. My question is, if I'm recording how much exercise I'm doing daily and how many calories burned with that exercise how should I record it. At the moment I'm really concentrating on cardio with my elliptical trainer, so I did 20 mins today and that showed I'd burned 237 calories. Now in a previous post about average cals burned on a ellipital trainer someone mentioned that you are still burned calories until your heart rate gets back to normal. So with this in mind, should I stop recording the amount of calories burned as soon as I finish the exercise, or until my heart rate goes below, say 100 BMP? Keeping the lap timer going until my rate went below 100 and not when I finished the exercise showed 260 instead of 237.

Also, as its related, if I were doing a workout without cardio, just weights/machines etc, how would I record the cals burned. Would I just start a 'lap' on my HRM at the very start of my workout and then take the total cals figure at the end of the workout?


why are you recording all of this?? I'm just asking because I don't think it's necessary to track every single tiny thing like that... I think you are overthinking all of this :nod:

Okay, I have a few questions regarding using a Heart Rate Monitor. I have a fairly budget model, but it does have stuff like laps, calories burned, avg rate, etc. My question is, if I'm recording how much exercise I'm doing daily and how many calories burned with that exercise how should I record it. At the moment I'm really concentrating on cardio with my elliptical trainer, so I did 20 mins today and that showed I'd burned 237 calories. Now in a previous post about average cals burned on a ellipital trainer someone mentioned that you are still burned calories until your heart rate gets back to normal. So with this in mind, should I stop recording the amount of calories burned as soon as I finish the exercise, or until my heart rate goes below, say 100 BMP? Keeping the lap timer going until my rate went below 100 and not when I finished the exercise showed 260 instead of 237.

Also, as its related, if I were doing a workout without cardio, just weights/machines etc, how would I record the cals burned. Would I just start a 'lap' on my HRM at the very start of my workout and then take the total cals figure at the end of the workout?

Those things don't usually work :cry:
I've also thought about it, as you have.

why are you recording all of this?? I'm just asking because I don't think it's necessary to track every single tiny thing like that... I think you are overthinking all of this :nod:
Well I guess I don't really need to track these things, but I want too and it keeps me focused, just like John use to take daily pics, weight himself daily, etc. I'm trying to build up to burning at least 1000 cals a day in exercise to assist my weightloss. I know these HRM/calorie things aren't super accurate, but its the only I know to track cals burned, so I'd like to do it as optimally (is that a word?) as possible.
Plus going back to the whole 'why bother', well another reason I want to be able to track my cals burned is so that when I had a bad day and eat say 300 cals over my daily allowance, then instead of feeling guilty about it to the point where I think, or well, sod it, I've runied my diet I might as well not bother at all (as I would have done many times in the past), my new plan is to burn off any excess, so if I'm naughty, then I just do 20 mins on the ellipitcal and then I don't have to feel guilty! :D

So with this in mind, should I stop recording the amount of calories burned as soon as I finish the exercise, or until my heart rate goes below, say 100 BMP?

Also, as its related, if I were doing a workout without cardio, just weights/machines etc, how would I record the cals burned.

When I was tracking calories I counted until my heart rate went below 50% of my max after cardio. And during lifting I started the watch immediately before my first set and stopped the watch when I got below 50% after my last set of the workout.

I don't think there's a right or wrong way to do it, but that's what made sense for me.

1,000 calories burned a day in exercise is a lofty goal. For me, it is easier to clean up my diet than to exercise this much, but different things work for different people. I hope you don't set such an aggressive goal that you burnout, however; I'm sure you'd still make great gains with only 500 calories of exercise a day, provided you ate well.

My question is, if I'm recording how much exercise I'm doing daily and how many calories burned with that exercise how should I record it.

First thing to do is to try and calibrate it. It is measuring your heart beats really accurately. But that it translates that into accurate calories should not be taken on faith.

In order to convert heart rate data into calorie data, the monitor needs to know at least two things - your MHR (maximum heart rate) and your VO2max. Did you put these into your monitor? Does it estimate them somehow? Did it ask a bunch of questions about your age, sex, height, weight, and activity? Does it have a "fitness test"? By hook or by crook, it has to get at those two numbers. Does it display them?

If it does, then you can check the MHR as you go along with the heart rates that you get while working out. And you can check your VO2max by using exercise tests such as are given here (http://www.brianmac.demon.co.uk/vo2max.htm). Other than the "result of race" test there which seems to have a bug.

Once you have checked that your monitor has good MHR and VO2max numbers for you, you can probably trust the calories.

If it turns out that your monitor is not using a good VO2max or MHR for you, you can either just figure a conversion factor, or tell the monitor different age, etc., to get better numbers. For a lot of things you really use the difference or ratio of the calories, not the absolute number of calories, so in those cases you don't have to worry about whether the VO2max is correct. The MHR is still important, but if you find your monitor has the wrong MHR you can probably get it to use an accurate one by lying to it about your age.

You also ask when to record them, because you want to measure the calories burned after exercise. Here is what I do to get all the information I want.


1. Start an exercise session when you work out. Have the monitor count the calories during the session. A good feature is if the monitor tells you the average heart rate and maximum heart rate during this period of time.

2. Start a new exercise session on the monitor as soon as you finish working out. This "session" will count the calories that you burn after the workout. Run this for a few hours.

3. Wear the heart monitor and run it for sessions that cover the same times as you work out and the time you run the after-workout calories, but on a rest day. These will give you baseline numbers of calories for the time of day that you work out, and the time afterwards.

Now, the effect of exercise is given by subtracting the calories in the baseline for the exercise time from the calories in the exercise session, and the calories from the baseline for the after-workout time from the calories in the after-exercise session.

This could sound complicated, but it's really not, once you do it a couple times. You don't have to keep doing baseline measurements - they will be pretty similar. I normally just figure 90-110 calories per hour baseline for myself, which is more or less how it comes out when I've measured it.

So the routine you end up with is simple. Start an exercise session when you exercise, stop it when you finish. Then start another session on the monitor and let it run for a few hours. Subtract off the calories you would have burned in that amount of time and you get a pretty good idea of what exercise calories you burned, and what exercise calories you kept burning after you stopped exercising.

One question you might have is "how many hours for the after-workout calories?" This will depend on how intense your exercise is. If you take a long LISS session, you might find that your heart rate is back to normal after only a few minutes. This is because your body doesn't get pushed too far from normal by LISS, and can get back to normal quickly. But if you have a really intense workout that burns a large amount of glycogen, it's going to take a longer time to get back to normal. The point of doing the baseline calories is that since you don't know how long it will take to get back to normal until you do the workout, get a nice long stretch that will cover a good deal of it. By subtracting the baseline, you avoid the problem of thinking you burned a lot of after-workout calories when that is what you would have burned anyway.

1,000 calories burned a day in exercise is a lofty goal.

Not really. It just takes time getting into shape to do it. There are lines of work where people routinely spend many more calories than that every day. They feed cadets at the service academies about 4000 calories a day, and that is a reasonable marker for what you could expect a fit, healthy, young person to spend if they had to.

My favorite example - Hotshot fire crews, spend more like 5000-6000 calories a day when they are on the job. And at the end of the fire season, they are not tiny shriveled up shadows of themselves. They even have to work out in the off season in order to be in shape to handle the upcoming season.

I think it's a lot easier to get to the point where you can burn 1000 exercise calories a day in exercise than say, bench 275.

Yes, I did have to enter age, sex, VO2max numbers, etc, so I guess its fairly accurate, or perhaps as accurate as these things can be.

Xenpharaohs, as ever, thanks for the detailed reponse, but I think I might initially go with Dan's tips on how he does it. Yours would no dount be more accurate, but I really don't like wearing the strap at the best of times, let a lone for a few hours to work out all the baselines, etc. Anyway, just done another 20 mins this evening (20 mins this morning), so 535 cals burned today :claphigh:

Just as an FYI - on good days where I do both weights and cardio, I expend about 1,000 calories.

I'm 44 yo, 5'10", 209 lbs as of today.

It took me four months and a loss of 22 lbs to get there - but I'm there - and I really enjoy it!

Hacedor

Yes, I did have to enter age, sex, VO2max numbers, etc, so I guess its fairly accurate, or perhaps as accurate as these things can be.

Xenpharaohs, as ever, thanks for the detailed reponse, but I think I might initially go with Dan's tips on how he does it. Yours would no dount be more accurate, but I really don't like wearing the strap at the best of times, let a lone for a few hours to work out all the baselines, etc. Anyway, just done another 20 mins this evening (20 mins this morning), so 535 cals burned today :claphigh:

Sounds like a good monitor. If it has a good MHR and VO2max then you should expect pretty good calorie counts.

Now the thing about Dan's is that it's reasonable, but definitely less accurate in some situations. It works pretty well if you are very fit, and do short intense sessions. The longer it takes for you to get to 50%, the less you should trust that method - it overestimates calories by including the ones you would have burned anyway.

Now the thing about Dan's is that it's reasonable, but definitely less accurate in some situations. It works pretty well if you are very fit, and do short intense sessions. The longer it takes for you to get to 50%, the less you should trust that method - it overestimates calories by including the ones you would have burned anyway.

Well to be honest, I went with the jist of Dan's method, but decided to stick with only counting the calories burned until my heart rate is below 100, because when I worked out 50% of my MHR as per Dan's suggestion, it would almost be my normal heart rate (I've worn the HRM sometimes just while watching TV just to see my resting rate and it seems to be around about 70-75 bpm) so I figure below a hundred is a good compromise. At the end of the day, I guess I just wanted to know whether it was standard to stop recording cals burnt as soon as I finished the exercise or not. I'm not overly bothered to having definative numbers, but equally I didn't want to be killing myself trying to get to 1000 cals burned a day, when I should have been taking into account cals burned while my heart rate was returning to normal.

I'm not overly bothered to having definative numbers, but equally I didn't want to be killing myself trying to get to 1000 cals burned a day, when I should have been taking into account cals burned while my heart rate was returning to normal.

The thing about good numbers is that you don't have to worry as much about how much you eat and how much you work. So to me, a little extra thinking about the numbers actually reduces the trouble quite a bit.

You might be surprised about your basal rate too. I have found that the calorie counting heart monitor is as good or better than the questionnaire web sites.