Don’t Trust Elliptical Calorie Counting
If you choose cardio based on what burns the most calories, you may have noticed that the elliptical trainer is the winner. (This is the case when your legs are in a jogging motion, but they are in contact with the machine all the time.) Unfortunately, calorie readings on exercise machines, including elliptical machines, are deliberately inaccurate.
After all, the machine doesn’t know much about you – often just your weight and heart rate. He makes some assumptions based on this data as well as the movement of the car. The heavier you are, the more calories you burn. The faster you walk, the more calories you burn.
A study published last year compared calorie burn on the Precor elliptical trainer to participants’ actual calorie burn as measured using laboratory equipment. The researchers asked participants to press the Quick Start button, which would make the machine start counting calories as if you were 150 pounds, 35 years old, and a man.
Result: After a 30-minute workout, the calorie count on the elliptical trainer was 128 more calories than the more accurate laboratory measurement. If you were to rely on this number to calculate your daily calorie deficit (say, if you were trying to burn 500 more calories than you ate), you would be wrong.
However, the truth is that you shouldn’t pay too much attention to the exact number of calories you burn through exercise. If a scientist doesn’t follow you all day with a computer and an oxygen mask, you will only get a very rough estimate of what that number could be. Exercise machines tend to overestimate the number of calories you burn because large numbers make customers happy. Therefore, if you get different numbers on the elliptical trainer and on the Fitbit, choose a lower number. But in reality, the winning move may be to not count activity calories at all .