Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire

Tuesday, December 13, 2011
So I've been spending a bit more time at the gym lately. Part of it is a stress management strategy brought on by the Deal that Apparently Never Ends™, and part of it is my Hot Cousin's fault. She recently competed in her first figure competition, and her discipline and results motivated me to be a bit more disciplined in my own right when it came to my body.


As part of my new program, I recently purchased a heart rate monitor. I suspected that the automatic calorie counters on most exercise machines were a bit generous with their values, and I read that chest strap heart monitors provided a much more accurate measure.


ZOMGWTFBBQ, the calorie counters on elliptical machines are just LIAR, LIAR, PANTS ON FIRE. The counts were off by almost 100%! Since I try to keep my calories consumed the same regardless of my gym routine, it's not as big an issue for me, but I can see how such metrics might lead someone astray if they tend to eat the calories they burn off during exercise. 


Not cool. Not cool at all.



3 comments:

John the Scientist said...

Oh yeah. The calorie counters on the elipticals are calibrated just as they are on a treadmill, but you don't burn nearly as much on an eliptical as you do running. You also don't bang your knees around as much, but for everything you gain switching exercises, you lose something.

I figured this out before I ran the numbers because I sweat like a pig when I exercise, and I don't sweat nearly as much on the eliptical as I do on the treadmill.

Steve Buchheit said...

Well, yeah, if you realized just how little those exercises were contributing, you wouldn't be using them.

Although, to be fair, YMMV. For me, carrying around an extra 100lbs, I would burn more calories doing the same thing than someone who was closer to their ideal weight was doing. Also, something to add in, when I had my stress test (at almost the same weight I am now), they had to put me on the treadmill at the highest angle to get my heart rate up to where they wanted it. As the techs commented, "We don't even have to do that for the student athletes that come in here." They were planning to give me an injection when I asked them to up the speed first.

We're all different. The heart monitor is responding to your actual performance, the machine it just looking at average energy spent.

Warner said...

Well you go further on the elipitcal, or up the level. I feel that I work harder, in the physics sense, on the eliptical for the same amount of time. Since both my weight and waist are dropping since I started exercise something is going on.

And I don't seem to be changing eating habits.

The machine read outs seem to have nothing to do with reality as the final display at end of work out often has nothing to do with the machine display during work out much less clock on wall. Gym company doesn't care, I asked.

On the other hand the last pair of pants I bought was a size smaller than I've been buying for a decade and my weight is under 210 for the first time in at least 20 years.