How can I calculate calories burned during an activity?
I've found various online "calculators" for looking up how many calories are burned when doing an exercise like using an Elliptical machine.
Is there a way to calculate how many calories I burned during an activity with some reliability? Does it matter if I train in intervals?
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I've posted some of the standard equations in my answer to: Metabolic Equations for Anaerobic Exercise?
Essentially if you know the duration of the exercise, your body Mass in Kg, and either the MET score for the exercise, or an average of your heart rate through the exercise, and an estimated or measured VO2max figure for yourself, you can estimate the KCal/min figure.
Using an app like DailyBurn or Lose It! which have built-in calorie calculators for typical exercises may be of use to you. I'm not sure how accurate they are, but this make it an easier job.
No, there is not a good way to get an estimate of how much you burn. Most machine estimates aren't very good, and they tend to be overly optimistic.
The only decent way to calculate energy burn is on a bicycle with a power meter, which is actually measuring the work that you are doing directly.
And no, it doesn't really matter if you are doing intervals.
You could get a wearable heart-rate monitor like the Bodybugg. It won't be perfect, of course, but it can use your heart rate throughout the day coupled with your height, daily weight, age, gender, etc. to estimate.
You should get yourself a decent heart-rate monitor and calibrate it yourself (as good as possible). What you do is you take a cycling home trainer and you follow the following protocol:
Maintain 80 rpm all the time
Start cycling for 3-5 minutes at 100 Watt
Add 30 Watt every 3 minutes
Monitor your heart rate
Assuming everything is more or less accurate, your heart rate should be increasing more or less linearly until you start get above your anaerobic threshold after which it may start to increase steeper.
The point is: it gives you a nice estimation of how much Watts you burn at what heart rate. And since Watts can be roughly translated to kilo-calories (1 kcal = 1.163 Watt), you get an idea of how much calories you've burned. Convert your heart rate over time to Watts and convert those to calories. Though I'm sure most of them will have one built-in. You can use your own 'calibration' to adjust the values.
If your a heart patient or you have any other diseases, your mileage may vary
You can try this calories burned calculator at www.totaldailyenergyexpenditure.com/calories-burned-calculator. It allows you to figure out one sessions worth of burned calories for any exercise, then add them up into a grand total.
I'm unsure of the reliability of the various calculators. The calculations depend on many factors including muscle density making it difficult to perform a precise calculation. You can buy a bodybugg which is purported to be incredibly reliable. These are the devices they use on the T.V. series "The Biggest Loser".
Breaking your routine into intervals will decrease the effectiveness of your workout. You will burn more calories and gain more tone working tired muscles than rested muscles.
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