A Measure of Success?
With scales that promise to measure body fat, treadmills that give information about fat calories burned, heart rate and pedometers that measure every step, how accurate is the information and how can you chart your progress effectively?
Anyone who exercises regularly has done it.
You log time on the treadmill and smile at the “calories burned” number on the machine. After your workout, you decide you can afford to eat that big brownie. After all, you just burned 1,000 calories. Not so fast.
“You can’t trust [those numbers],” says Heather Riordan, a personal trainer in Chicago who has worked in the fitness industry since 1987.
“[Fitness machines] use an average, which may or may not be appropriate for you. Even when age and weight are entered, it doesn’t take into account your metabolism or your fitness level. Heck, it doesn’t even know if you hold onto the handle on the front, or get off the treadmill and chat with friends for half of the workout.”
The typical resting heart rate for an adult is somewhere between 40 and 90 beats per minute, which is quite a range. A stair-climbing machine can’t possibly tell if the person sweating on the machine is a marathon runner or a rookie to the gym who hasn’t exercised a day in her life.
So if the numbers are so arbitrary, why do the machines even bother? It often comes down to the old bottom line, Riordan says.
“The manufacturers of treadmills and ellipticals always use the figures that tend to overestimate calorie burn, so that people get on that machine because they think they burn more calories,” she says. “Eventually the health club buys more of that machine.”
Donna [LAST NAME!???!!!], a Minneapolis resident who enjoys exercising on an elliptical machine knows that the numbers aren’t 100 percent accurate, but she still finds them useful. “I use the calories burned settings and heart rate displays as benchmarks to make gradual improvements,” she says. For a ballpark number, the numbers do work, but there are more precise methods that will produce better results for you and your fitness plan.
“The easiest solution is to get a heart rate monitor,” says Riordan, “which ranges from $35.00 for a basic model to hundred of dollars for one that downloads your calories burned to your computer.” She says, however, that even when you use a heart rate monitor, the kind of exercise you do requires a different math equation to accurately measure the quality of your workout. “I actually use a different formula for running than I do for Spinning, and for swimming you have to reduce the bpm by at least 10 because you’re submerged in water—that pressure changes your heart rate.”
For the clearest picture of your fitness statistics and exercise needs, experts recommend metabolic testing, which runs around $150 at fitness clinics. After you’re hooked up to a machine that reads your levels of oxygen consumed and carbon dioxide produced, you can truly know whether or not you “earned” that brownie.
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