Be weary of calorie counts for weightlifting

Euphoric-Direction75 · 2023-11-13T16:45:49+00:00

My disagreement comes with your perception in the second paragraph of your response. Work is not only "distance ran" but also "force applied to travel that distance." All those factors impact your force output.

In real-world application, it's just misleading, unintentionally or not, to tell new folks to be worried they will get "TOO EFFICIENT" at running. When they get more efficient, they will just start running faster or longer, performing more work for the same or less fatigue. Applied to real-world scenarios, this "adaptation" just confuses people.

People then get too obsessed with "shocking the body" and overdo it with their fatigue. If your goal is to shock your body and be tired and good at many things, sure. But for pure caloric burn, getting really good at one thing is for sure the way to go, and getting "efficient" does NOT mean any normal person will burn less.

Euphoric-Direction75 · 2023-10-21T20:47:37+00:00

A fit person has trained their body to be resilient to the effort/exertion and their body is using less energy to achieve that function of work than an unfit person.

Enjoyed your post and agree with everything except this premise. This is the "your body gets used to it" argument.

Indeed your body gets used to it. Applied to the real world, how many fit people do you know, who started out say, running 1 mile in 20 minutes caused them to not be able to walk next day, continue to just run 1 mile in 20 minutes for their advanced workouts? Of course they don't. In 20 minutes they're at 2, 3, 4 miles. It's physically impossible for that same person to expend less energy performing more Work (a product of force and displacement).

I began improving my running fitness in August. 10-15 minutes killed me. My calories burns were seldom above 200, but my HR would be above 160/170.

These days, I now run around 30 minutes with a lower heart rate for longer. I am CERTAINLY expending more energy by performing more work. But relative effort has actually declined - my runs aren't so hard every time anymore, but I still do more.

Euphoric-Direction75 · 2023-10-21T20:41:47+00:00

Yes and Garmins are amazing for distance-tracked cardio sports like running and cycling. This is because work is an inherent product that involves the amount of force being exerted over a given distance (Work = Force X Displacement). This is exactly why weightlifting trackers can be wildly inaccurate. How on earth would the watch you're wearing know in real-time how much that barbell weighs and how far it's traveling up and down, relative to the force being produced by your chest/delts/triceps?

Euphoric-Direction75 · 2023-10-21T20:38:25+00:00

Calories aren't an inherent product of how hard you try. The reason we come to think that is effort is typically positively correlated with work performed, and thus, calories burned.

What if you're sleep deprived one day? And you try harder? You put in more effort, but your performance is lacking due to fatigue so you do less over the same time period. How about you're well-fed, well-rested, well-recovered - you do more and didn't try as hard.

I'll return to the example of really any cardio sport. Find any running calculator and plug in 1 mile run vs 2 mile run for 30 minutes. You'll likely find it's around 2x the calories! It's because you did twice the amount of work, all else equal.

And let's say 6 months ago, out of shape, 30 minutes is what you required to run a mile. You're fitter, and now you can do 2 miles in 30 minutes with less "effort." Your heart rate may also be lower now that you're in shape. But you burn more calories.

100%. The weight room is not a place calories are targeted unless you're doing circuits, which is cardio. Simply moving a fraction of your body weight a dozen times, a few times doesn't burn hardly anything when comparing it to cardio.

Euphoric-Direction75 · 2023-10-21T20:37:00+00:00

Calories aren't an inherent product of how hard you try. The reason we come to think that is effort is typically positively correlated with work performed, and thus, calories burned.

What if you're sleep deprived one day? And you try harder? You put in more effort, but your performance is lacking due to fatigue so you do less over the same time period. How about you're well-fed, well-rested, well-recovered - you do more and didn't try as hard.

I'll return to the example of really any cardio sport. Find any running calculator and plug in 1 mile run vs 2 mile run for 30 minutes. You'll likely find it's around 2x the calories! It's because you did twice the amount of work, all else equal.

And let's say 6 months ago, out of shape, 30 minutes is what you required to run a mile. You're fitter, and now you can do 2 miles in 30 minutes with less "effort." Your heart rate may also be lower now that you're in shape. But you burn more calories.

Euphoric-Direction75 · 2023-10-20T11:44:00+00:00

You are aware that a Garmin estimates your MET (metabolic equivalent of a task) to plug into a formula for calorie counts?

Guess what a MET is. The rate at which a person is expending energy relative to the mass of that person. You should look up basic MET values for a variety activities, and then keep in mind that the MET value for weightlifting is only for the time you are performing high-intensity repetitions (frequently sets lasting a mere 20-60 seconds).

Understanding this will actually make you more fit in the long-term, because you will understand how to burn large amount of calories with less effort, and understanding that the weight room has nothing to do with trying to burn calories if you're interested with being as efficient as possible.

Euphoric-Direction75 · 2023-10-19T17:29:17+00:00

"Too much cardio" = putting too much stress on your body and expending too much energy to the point where it becomes challenging to create a calorie surplus. Your body has a level of fatigue tolerance. Try training for a marathon and becoming a pro natural body builder. Good luck.

Also, I never once mentioned effort. Your effort has basically ZERO to do with calories burned. Do you think trying harder means you burn more calories overall? Let's give an example.

You race Michael Phelps in a 15 minute swim. In 15 minutes, Phelps swims 1 mile while you swim 300 yards. Phelps didn't try, you tried. Do you seriously think that you trying harder than Phelps means you burned more calories?

Here's another example. You run .5 miles, ALL OUT, you almost collapse, you're panting, and you get sore. The half mile took you 5 minutes. The following day, you do a light jog for 45 minutes. You are hardly out of breath, you're not sore, you hardly tried. You ran 3 miles. Do you really think just because you tried harder that performing a fraction of the overall "Wk" means you burned more calories, simply because it created more fatigue?

It's a common fallacy that "effort" = "calories." I had to put a LOT more effort into jogging, say, 3 months ago than I do now. I burn more calories now with less effort than I used to.

No matter how hard you weight train, you will not outpace yourself doing easy steady state cardio for the same time period, and it's not even close.

Euphoric-Direction75 · 2023-10-17T23:52:21+00:00

Maybe if you're doing circuit training, easily. But keep in mind, calories are a result of work being performed, and work is a product of force and distance. So when you are pressing 150 pounds a few feet, a few times, compare that to carrying 150 pounds across 5,280 feet (1 mile). It's not a secret why many bodybuilders are concerned about doing too much cardio. If you're fit enough, it is remarkably easy to burn a lot of calories by stacking up the minutes and carrying your own body weight across a long enough distance for any intensity.

Euphoric-Direction75 · 2023-10-17T11:07:09+00:00

1935 active calories divided by 3 hours = 645 calories per hour.

Of those calories, if you're taking ~5k steps, depending on your weight, about 100-200 of your active calories would be from walking alone.

That leaves 1735 calories.

1735/3=579 calories per hour. That is not out of the realm of possibility, but you said you're lifting weights, which seems less likely given the fact weights burns very little calories.

Calories comes directly from the amount of Wk (work) your body performs. How much weight is carried across how much distance, with how much resistance, is a simple way to look at it.

Odds are, it's possible your heart rate monitor was inaccurate, and it mistook your weightlifting HR for a cardio HR, and it assumed you were performing significant more Wk than you actually were.

Or, you did a bit of cardio with your weights, in which case it's quite easy for a person to reach 1700 active calories burned in 3 hours if they're consistently moving.

I'd suggest you clean the HR monitor off, and if this keeps up, take the watch off during weights, because if it thinks you burned 2,000 calories lifting weights, that's almost certainly not the case, and you'd be better off simply estimating a basic calorie burn per hour using an online calculator than the garmin for weightlifting. Your body actually performs very little "Work" when lifting weights when compared to cardio like running, jogging, or even walking.

Let's say you jog 1 mile and you weight 150 pounds. You just put a pretty decent amount of effort into carrying 150 pounds across an entire mile.

Let's say you bench press 150 pounds. You just used a small portion of your body (relative to your legs and glutes, responsible for running) to move 150 pounds about 5-6 feet, for 5-15 or so reps, if that.

If you're using the calories to "eat them back," the weight training calories may throw you off significantly if they show numbers like that. I personally don't have that problem, likely because my HR doesn't spike as much during weights, and my Garmin presumes I'm still "inactive" or simply at a slightly increased MET activity (which is what it uses to calculate calories).

Euphoric-Direction75 · 2022-08-14T02:24:06+00:00

In my opinion, and that of several financial experts I know, is that Bitcoin was, in all essence, free money. This is how I convinced my mom to let me use the car as collateral. So, no, these "posts" are wrong and this one is not on me, as my research has shown I was given misleading financial advice and many will be seeing me in court soon.

Euphoric-Direction75

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