So at the gym, I recently discovered how much more fun the elliptical is than the treadmill, and I've been doing the elliptical every day now for about an hour. I put it on a fairly high setting, but it still feels like a light workout. I can easily go for an hour without feeling out of breath at all. However, the heart rate moniter says my heart rate is well above the "intense" level, and it said that I burned about 600 calories in an hour. My question is, how much can I trust those numbers? 600 calories? Really? That's probably well over a third of all the calories I eat in a day. I certainly don't feel as if I've burned 600 calories -- I'm sweaty by the end, and my muscles hurt, but I'm not in least out of breath. On the treadmill, it takes a lot of sweat and toil to get that high (and I'm disinclined to believe that the calorie counter on the treadmill is accurate). It just seems too easy. What do y'all think?
Posted by Noemon (Member # 1115) on :
I always take those readouts with a huge grain of salt. I try to always use the same machine, and just use the "calories burned" display to judge the relative intensity of each day's workout, rather than to estimate how many calories a given workout actually burned.
Posted by Lyrhawn (Member # 7039) on :
That's what I do too. Even when I can't use the same machine, I generally assume they're all more or less the same, and instead of thinking "Hey I burned X calories today!" I usually say "Oh good, I burned more than usual."
Posted by scholarette (Member # 11540) on :
On my bike, I can ride at a fairly intense rate for an hour and it says I have burned 20 calories. It also says I have ridden under 5 miles. I use the numbers to give me an idea in comparison to previous days, but I view them as made up, randomly scaled numbers.
Posted by katharina (Member # 827) on :
The calorie counters on the elliptical are not very accurate. Most of the calorie counters are not terribly accurate, but the ones are the elliptical seems especially prone to wild flights of imagination.
Trust your body - even if you are a little sore and tired, if you were never breathing hard and don't feel like you did a big workout, you probaly didn't.
Still, as long as you know they are wrong, you can use them as a relative measurement, as long as you don't use them as an indication of how many calories to consume that day in order to meet your goal (whatever it may be).