Your
huffin and puffin, and the sweat is dripping down. You look at your treadmill
or elliptical trainer and it tells you that you have just reached 5 miles and
have burned 400 calories. Now you feel justified eating that chocolate sundae
the night before. But was the number of calories actually burned accurate.
If
your cardio is pumping, you feel out of breath and you're sweating profusely,
then you can feel good about getting a good workout. But don't base you intake
of calories by how many your elliptical trainer or treadmill is telling you what
you burned. Because according to the experts the readouts are an estimate and
not exact figures. In fact, tests have proven that the readouts vary significantly
between different brands and models of home fitness equipment.
"What
consumers need to keep in mind is that the readouts are meant to be an estimate
of energy expenditure," said Mark Reinking, assistant professor of physical
therapy at St. Louis University. "There are good data from lots of research
over the years of about how much energy it costs to do certain activities.
"So
when I walk up to the treadmill, I input my age and weight. It will give me an
estimate based on my age, my weight, the speed that the treadmill is going, and
give me an estimate of the energy I'm expending."
So
you can use the calorie burn readout as a benchmark, but rely on your own personal
feeling about the progress you are making. And if you are using the same machine
over and over, you can use the readout as a relative report on how you have progressed
over a period of time.
It
may not tell me exactly how many calories I've burned, but I can use it as a way
to benchmark my progress. If your elliptical shows that you burned 300 calories,
and a month later, as you build up your cardio you see you have burned 400 calories,
then Yes you are improving.
But
don't be thrown off if a month later and allot of hard work you go on a different
elliptical trainer and it shows you only burned 300 calories. That machine could
have a radically different formula for burning calories. Even the top of the line
machines cannot be exact. There are a number of factors that go into calculating
calories burned, including who's working out on the elliptical trainer, their
muscle mass, conditioning, resting metabolism, and other variables.
In
the future use the calorie burn readout as a figure for determining progress,
but not as an absolute.
At
EllipticalTrainers.com you will find a comprehensive list of ratings
and reviews on the most popular elliptical machines. We do more then rate,
we educate the consumer.
