Calories Burned; Calculated by Heartrate Monitor

[thorleif]

Just wondering how accurate the calories burned calculation is on heartrate monitors. I have a Polar, believe its an F4, and was wondering to what degree of reliability you can count on these things for.

I enter my height/weight/age, but get different numbers from the monitor, the cardio machines, and estimates I have found online.

[qdmcg]

i'd imagine that the heartrate monitor, assuming that its not a piece of [censored], will be the most accurate.

presumably it takes into account your actual heart rate + age, etc. whereas many treadmills, etc. don't do that

however, i've heard that overall these aren't very good estimators

[kerowo]

These probably aren't going to give you a 100% accurate number on how many calories you burned for a given effort, but the Polar should be consistant enough that if you work 8% harder for a given effort it will report 8% more calories. So it's probably a better indicator of how much effort a given work out is going to take and how that changes over time.

[Reqtech]

The polar is going to give you more accurate results since it has more data points than the calorie counters that come attached to cardio machines. If you are able to enter your VO2max, that should make it fairly accurate. There are a couple ways to estimate your VO2max, but the best way is to go and get a physical. Good wayto get your max HR number, too, since the whole 220 - age thing isn't terribly accurate.