# Heart Rate Monitors/Calories Burned **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [November 17, 2003, 4:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heart-rate-monitors-calories-burned/213641 "2003-11-17T04:23:38Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Heart\_On\_My\_Sleeve](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/77aa72/32.png) [@Heart\_On\_My\_Sleeve](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Heart_On_My_Sleeve)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2003, 4:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heart-rate-monitors-calories-burned/213641/1 "2003-11-17T04:23:38Z")
I fairly recently bought a mio heart rate monitor, the type that you wear on your wrist and put your index and middle fingers on the face of the watch to get your heart rate. I checked it against some of the machines at the gym and they agree pretty well. I only recently discovered it’s ability to supposedly calculate my calorie expenditure based on my heart rate. I’ve been doing this for workouts, but I was curious to know how many calories I expend per day. So you put in your weight (198lbs. for me, sex (F)), which I’m guessing this uses to calculate as well. I started the timer at about 11:20 this morning. It’s a little after 10:20 PM now, so about 11 hours. The watch indicates that I burned about 3360 calories in 11 hours. That just seems high to me. True, this morning, I cleaned up after the cats for about an hour (mostly vacuuming) this morning and I did go to the gym and lift weights for about 1/2 hour and did aerobics for 35 min, then stretched for about 10 minutes. I’m obsessive when I’m wearing the monitor about checking my heart rate, so I think the heart rate has been pretty accurate all day. So, any experience with this? Any knowledge of the monitor? Thanks! ---
**Author:** ![Wesley\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wesley_clark/32/20581_2.png) [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2003, 4:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heart-rate-monitors-calories-burned/213641/2 "2003-11-17T04:26:50Z")
theres no way 3360 in 11 hours. that works out to roughly 5500 a day (when you factor in sleep). are you new to exercising? if you are perhaps your resting heart rate is in the low 90s, giving a false reading of doing low intensity aerobics 24/7. Does the watch know your baseline resting pulse? ---
**Author:** ![Heart\_On\_My\_Sleeve](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/77aa72/32.png) [@Heart\_On\_My\_Sleeve](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Heart_On_My_Sleeve)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2003, 4:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heart-rate-monitors-calories-burned/213641/3 "2003-11-17T04:43:38Z")
I’m not new to exercise, but I’ve been doing more high-intensity than before for about a year now. My resting heart rate is around 60-65 taken 1st thing AM. For aerobics, I don’t feel like I’m working unless my heart rate is 170-175 BPM, so that’s usually where I am when I’m doing aerobics. If I’m hanging around on the couch watching TV, heart rate is 75-80 BPM. It does have my RHR programmed in as the first thing in the morning #. That’s what the instructions told me to do. Do you think I need to put in my lounging-around rate? I think I put it at 63. When I was doing it through workouts only, it was saying I burned about 700 calories during a typical hour-15 min workout. It does seem high to me, because I have been working out at this high intensity and I’ve lost only about 12 lbs. in the last year. I generally watch what I eat–when I’m really watching, I’m at about 2000 calories/day…I think probably it’s a bit higher when I’m not watching, maybe 2500?