By Gabe Sanders PhD, NSCA-CSCS
Be careful believing the treadmill/ elliptical when it provides you with a total number of calories burned at the end of your aerobic conditioning. These caloric expenditure numbers can be misguiding and lead you to be misinformed.
As an exercise physiologist, I use expensive and sophisticated equipment that allows me to measure caloric expenditure. The actual number of calories a person burns in an exercise session is closely related to their gender, exercise intensity, muscle mass and their ability to take in oxygen or simply put, their breathing rate. Exercise machines like the treadmill, elliptical, bike, etc. use calculations based on the resistance or speed of the machine and a person’s weight.
Keep in mind that weight alone is not accurate because a 200-pound person with a lot of muscle will burn far more calories than a 200-pound person with a lot of body fat. However the machine will tell you the calories burned are the same.
Many people get in to trouble because they believe they’ve burned 350 calories during an elliptical exercise session when in reality they may have burned 150 or 200 calories. This false knowledge of calories burned can lead you to eat more food or calories than you actually burned.
You may find yourself saying, “I burned 400 calories on the elliptical so I can eat this food because it’s only 400 calories.”
The reality is that if you eat the 400-calorie food because you think your burned 400 calories, you may be eating more than you actually burned which can be a detriment to your health and weight loss efforts.
Use the calorie counter as an exercise intensity guide
My recommendation is to use the calorie counter as an exercise intensity guide but not as a calorie-counting tool to allow you leniency regarding foods you can and cannot eat. If you typically exercise on the elliptical for twenty minutes, use the number of calories burned to establish your overall exercise intensity on the machine. If one session you burn 223 calories in twenty minutes, great!
For your next session, try to burn 250 calories in that same twenty-minute time frame. If the machine tells you, you burned more calories in the same twenty-minute time frame, then great; you improved your overall exercise intensity! Over time, exercising at a greater intensity will lead to weight loss and a better aerobic capacity, meaning you can exercise longer and harder.