If you exercise to lose weight, it is important to know how many calories you burn in a session. Many exercise machines such as treadmills, ellipticals and stationary bicycles report your calorie burn directly on the console. You should suspect the accuracy of these numbers, however, as they cannot account for all of the factors that go into determining how many calories you burn at any given activity.
How Calorie Counters Work
Most calorie counters determine calories burned based on an average exerciser. The more information you enter into a calorie counter, the more realistic picture you get. Plug in your gender, age and weight, and your calorie burned results show an average for a person of your similar measurements. If you do not enter your personal stats, a machine usually defaults to a pre-programmed weight. For example, a Life Fitness machine---if you do not tell it otherwise--assumes you weigh 150 pounds. The result is an overestimation of calories burned if you weigh less than 150 pounds or an underestimation if you weigh more.
Limitations
The measure of caloric expenditure should take into account distance covered and body weight, but also fitness level, efficiency at a particular exercise, heart rate and oxygen consumption. Realistically, machines can only use the weight, distance and possibly heart rate to provide its answers. To get a precise measure of calories burned, you would have to perform exercise in a clinical setting where special equipment measures the heat released from your body.
Expert Insight
Conrad Earnest, chief exercise physiologist at the Cooper Institute in Dallas, notes in a June 2006 "Washington Post" article that most machines' calculations are based on scientific equations that are reasonably accurate. John Porcari, a professor of exercise and sport science at the University of Wisconsin in La Crosse, thinks machines' estimations are a bit of a wild card. Although sometimes machines can be "right on," their estimations can also be as much as 30 percent off in either direction, he says in a January 2010 "Los Angeles Times" article.
Considerations
The effectiveness of exercise machine calorie counters depends somewhat on the type of exercise. Although treadmills (when weight is entered) and stationary cycles are more accurate, newer machines like ellipticals and stair-steppers require a degree of skill by the participant, and this affects total calorie burn. Holding onto handrails can throw off your calorie burn significantly---from 10 percent to 40 percent.
Solution
Do not completely ignore the readings on your workout machines' calorie monitor. The report might provide guidance, especially in rating your level of exertion from day to day. If one day you burn 400 calories in 30 minutes and the next day, doing the same exercise, you burn only 250, you know you didn't push as hard. Do not choose an exercise machine solely based on the calorie burn reading. Elliptical trainers often report a very high calorie burn in one session. If the elliptical machine includes arm poles, it is possible to burn a significant amount of calories in a session because more muscle groups are involved in the workout. However, if you are working at the same intensity as you do on other machines, it is likely that the calorie burn is similar across modalities.
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