Tracking calories burned on different types of cardio machines.

I am doing a mix of the treadmill, elliptical, rowing machine, and stationary bike as a part of most of my workouts. I noticed that the bike is tracking burning far more calories than the others, even though it’s the easiest part of my workout by far. Am I perhaps not submitting them correctly? It seems like it’s only calculating based on time/distance. Is that correct?

For example, if I do the elliptical with a resistance of 8, after twenty minutes I’m usually at around 2km. This is maintaining about 150-160 rpm. This is much harder than the bike, but is counting as half the calories even though I’m doing it longer as well. Is there a way to factor resistance? Additionally, the row I do for 15mins with a sort of HIIT routine of 30 seconds hard 30 seconds easy on the highest resistance level. This is by far the most strenuous part of my working but again, is showing up as significantly less calories burned then the bike.

I realize all these are estimates and can’t be relied on too much anyways. I more just submit the exercises to motivate and track progress, but if there’s something I could do to make these more accurate I’d like to.

brett

The most accurate would probably be to wear a chest HR monitor and trust it for all calorie count.

You select each time if that was easy/normal/strenous… so I’d try to rate the bike as easy and others difficult.
Also when I do HIIT, I enter a separate custom work out with zero for distance, just to count additional calories.

Oh, cheers for that. I didn’t realize that submitting the difficulty affected calories burned. I figured the overall total of about 800 calories for an hour of cardio was about right, since only about half of it is really strenuous. I just thought the breakdown was a bit weird.

The hr monitor does seem like a good absolute method though.

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