A Hands-on Experiment With Calories and Elliptical Machines
This is a follow-up post to the piece from a few months ago: "The Inaccurate Calorie Burn Readout on Cardio Equipment". To quickly recap that article, two women were overhead in the gym discussing how many calories they burned while exercising on elliptical machines. One woman burned a substantial amount of more calories than the other, or at least she thought she did and claimed that one elliptical machine burned more calories than the other. In reality, the machine was displaying an inaccurate calorie readout for both women and odds are, the woman who thought she burned nearly double the calories than the other more than likely continued someone else's workout. So this experiment goes to prove how inaccurate some cardio equipment can be.
I decided to dig up my old Polar Heart Rate monitor, replaced all batteries and get it going again. The heart rate monitor is approximately seven years old, but works great! I entered in all my information (age, gender, height, weight) and decided to test it at the gym against two different elliptical machines.
On the first day I used an eight year old Lifetime elliptical machine (I asked the gym staff for approximate age of the machine). I was able to enter the same information as my heart rate monitor except gender and height (my heart rate monitor takes these into account). After a one hour workout at a decent level I noticed the heart rates were calculating at the exact same rate throughout the 60 minute session. At the end of the workout I burned 571 calories according to my heart rate monitor and 768 according to the machine!!
On the second day I used a new (7 months old) cross-training elliptical machine by Octane Fitness and again, I was able to enter all the same information as my heart rate monitor except for gender and height. Once again, the heart rates matched exactly through the entire 60 minutes. According to my heart rate monitor, the calories burned were 574 compared to 711 on the machine.
I know this may seem like a silly little experiment, but it does go to show you cannot base your calories burned by what the machines display. These differences of 197 and 137 are quite substantial to someone who is monitoring calories in and calories out on a daily basis.