If I go to the gym and burn 370 calories how do I enter this?
So I use a HR monitor to figure how many calories I burn during exercise. Cronometer doesn’t always accurately depict how many calories are used in an activity. Walking for me is way off where as cycling is pretty close.
I did indoor cycling and burnt 370 calories. It took me about 55 minutes. So if I go to add exercise and select “bicycling stationary spin class” and fudge with the minutes and set them to 50 minutes it says 372 kcals. Are kcals for exercise the same as calories? I’ve seen some other posts that say there are 1000 calories per kcal? I’m confused.
Answers
There are two meanings of calorie,
1) energy needed to raise 1g water 1C
2) energy needed to raise 1kg water 1C
The calorie we use in food and exercise is the second, Cal. Calling it kcal removes the ambiguity. But no one uses the first definition anymore. Scientists use joules and kilojoules.
Tl;dr calories are the same as kcal.
There is another aspect to this that throws off exercise calories. Some machines/apps report net calories (calories burned just for the exercise), while others report gross calories (calories burned for the exercise plus the base calories burned for breathing and living).
I believe that Cronometer uses net calories when entering an activity manually, while your gym equipment or other application may be showing you gross calories. This may not be what’s happening with your numbers but is a factor to consider.
Another factor is that different applications and equipment use different formulas and different code to calculate calories burned. There will surely be some deviations when using different equipment and software.
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
Thank you for this info Power_lifter. I hadn’t thought of gross versus net calories. I use a Polar HR monitor so I assume this is calculating gross calories. So, I could reduce the amounts from my HR monitor by a guesstimate of what calories I would have burnt if I wasn’t exercising based on my base calorie burn (BMR). Does this track with what you were saying?
I didn’t mean to imply that this is actually happening with your numbers, but yes, if you think that polar is showing gross calories then this is what I meant
Alternatively, and what I do, is simply manually enter the exercise and duration into Cronometer. It’s not as efficient, but is the most practical approach that I’ve found and ensures that my total calories eaten and burned are consistent within Cronometer.
I ran into a similar problem with the Runtastic app. I finally just gave up sync’ing the two apps and started entering my runs manually into Cronometer. I use the Runtastic info to know my pace and duration.
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.