I had previously heard and read that calorie expenditure measured in the heart rate monitors can be as far off as 1/3, for example because arm movements disproportionally increase your heart rate without really burning more calories proportionally. As a result, I fell into the habit of subtracting 30% of workout calories on my H7 Polar Beat heart rate monitor (HRM) each time I entered the calories into my calorie counting app.
I’ve recently started doing Insanity from beachbody (I’m not a coach). It really is insane. I’m working on my fitness, but wouldn’t call myself fit by any means (yet!). Hence, I often pause the dvd to be able to recover and start the workout again.
Something didn’t seem right with the calorie estimator. I didn’t really know how it worked but I noticed that, when I was pausing the program, for one to two minutes a time to recover, the HRM would record my falling heart rate, and the calories would still be increasing. The problem is I wasn’t moving at all, just standing there, catching my breath. So the calorie estimates of my insanity workouts seemed even more inaccurate.
I decided to investigate further how heart rate monitors operate and count calories and found this very helpful and insightful article: (quick summary below)
The gist of it is that calorie counting is a BS popular feature in HRM. Unless you invest in one of the 300-400$ HRM listed in the above article, that don’t rely on some common formula for everyone, but rather have a fit test and settings to take into account your current fitness level and other physical charactaristics (like VO2 max and max heart rate). I was surprised to see that my H7 Polar HRM strap did not make it to the list. I’ll investigate if there now is an app that calculates calories better than the Polar Beat app and let you know.
Thankfully, workouts like insanity include an all inclusive meal plan and I don’t really have to worry right now about calorie counting and adding back expended calories. But it’s very good to know.
oliviasfitnessjourney 