There is something else that I ran across while trying to figure out the parameters of the work out I will be doing. Jennifer knows what I'm numbers freak I am so
this article caught my eye.
The upshot is that when using some of the machines like elliptical, treadmill, etc. that the part of the program that counts your calories is usually fairly inaccurate. This study which was based on VO2 analyzer readings found the following discrepancies:
Treadmill: Overestimated calories burnt by 13 percent.
Stationary Bike: Overestimated calories burnt by 7 percent.
Stair Climber: Overestimated calories burnt by 12 percent.
Elliptical: overestimated calories burnt by 42 percent.
Sorry...
A fellow that I follow in the quantified self community found a handy calculator. It is interactive and you can just plug in your machine reading for correction.
You can use it
here.
Another thing that I discovered the last time I was using an elliptical and the gym while that was that I had problems with the built in heart rate monitors that utilize the hand grips. There was a lot of variation from machine to machine and even while exercising on the same machine I would get wildly variant readings.
I like having all the numbers spit out it once at the end of my workout instead of having a separate wrist monitor although of course the separate monitor was the accurate one. I found that I could just wear the chest strap from any Polar heart rate monitor and it would communicate with the equipment in the gym as long as I did
not use the silver groups. That way I could still use the readout reference at the end and just write it all down at once.
Of course if you are using an all-in-one activity tracker this is entirely moot.
I know I am probably the only one in here that is that fussy about numbers. But I thought if there were any other data geeks in here it might be handy.
