Okay, so no need to remind me that I have been a TERRIBLE blogger lately!!! Work has been FAIRLY busy and evenings have been, well, BUSY!!! We got the side of our house done and it looks great!! Tonight we have an appointment then I know for SURE I will be planting some flowers, but maybe blocking the shed as well…bah, I won’t even get into all that again!!!
Anyway, so this time LAST week I decided I would start monitoring my heart rate on a daily basis (for a week) to see how many calories I was burning and my average heart rates and what not…AND because I love to crunch numbers.
So here is what I came up with – I made sure that I didn’t do anything TOO out of the ordinary on these days, there is only one where I did a BIT more than I usually do. And this doesn’t include any workouts.
Thursday – worn for 15.75 hours – burned 2601 calories
Friday - worn for 15.75 hours – burned 3096 calories (I adjusted the weight on my HRM that day AND I did a lot of moving boxes around the office)
Saturday – Worn for 13.75 hours – burned 2818 calories
Sunday – Worn for 10 hours (OOPS! Forgot for a couple of hours!) – burned 2089 calories (I also ate a lot this day!)
Monday – Worn for 15.75 hours – burned 2870 calories
Tuesday - Worn for 14.25 hours – burned 2770 calories
Wednesday – Worn for 15.5 hours - burned 2557 (this was a LAZY day!!!)
Wednesday overnight (I decided to do this one on a whim!) worn for 8.5 hours – burned 1108 calories
On Average I burn 188 calories per hour!!! That’s crazy!!! And that included one high day and one low…the number that showed up the most was 165 though.
While I slept, I burned 130 calories per hour.
Some interesting things about my heart rate:
Average heart rate for me was 83 – this is JUST above POOR!!! That’s terrible!!
Max heart rate average was around 141 (the highest I got to while awake was 153 – while moving boxes at work).
The SCARY part for me??? While I slept my heart rate averaged 67 and the MAX was 204!!!!! I want to know what I was dreaming of!!! That is SUPER scary to me though because my MAX heartrate should be 194 for my age…that is just crazy!!
Anyway, I would love to know how accurate a heart rate monitor is for this kind of thing…according to the results my daily average for calorie burn is 2685. If you add on my calories while sleeping, that is 3794!!! Since I am eating WAY less than that per day and not losing…I think there has to be something a LITTLE wrong there!!
Anybody know anything about how reliable HRM’s are supposed to be??
12 Comments
June 4, 2009 at 7:54 pm
that is so crazy about your dreaming. I really want to try that now!
I don’t know about hear rate monitors at all but that is incredible.
Talk to you soon
C
June 4, 2009 at 8:35 pm
Great post! I’ve been wondering about this myself. You may have just inspired me to do my own test. Which HRM are you using? I have the Polar F6. I love it.
Take care, cath
June 4, 2009 at 8:52 pm
Very interesting. Fun experiement.
I frankly wouldn’t trust the numbers all that much. I’d use it basically to compare day to day. (we use all kinds of really really fancy expensive instrumentation and even it is only really good for comparisons. It’s because everything needs to be calibrated for your own body and stuff).
June 4, 2009 at 9:45 pm
I have a Polar F6, and for exercise it seems to be fairly accurate. By that it means that it’s similar to values I get on Sparkpeople, and also other calories-burned calculating websites. However, I wore it for 12 hours one day, and I had burned 1603 calories. I put it on at 4:10 pm and took it off when I got up to go to the bathroom at 4:10 am (it had stopped–it must have dried or something). But it only stopped like 3 minutes before I took it off.
Anyway, since I eat around 2000 and exercise off 500 pretty much ever day, and I haven’t been losing, either, I’m not sure of it’s “at-rest” accuracy. But I wish I knew how to make it more accurate! I worry that I’m burning less than I think I am when I exercise!
June 4, 2009 at 10:41 pm
Wow, those are some interesting results! Sounds like a fun experiment. I’m with Randi on not trusting the exact numbers…but I’m a huge skeptic about everything
June 4, 2009 at 11:35 pm
Wow, that seems like A LOT. Hmmm. I don’t know? I’ve heard that HRM are kind of inaccurate, but I wouldn’t think they’d be THAT inaccurate, like if it is it’s probably only off by 100 or so calories, I would think… It doesn’t hurt to wear it and compare the day to day numbers though.
I want to get a HRM to wear when I’m running, though. What kind are you using?
June 5, 2009 at 12:40 am
I did this experiment a while ago when I first got my HRM and I forgot to post about it I think. I remember getting the same kind of results for the calorie burn. I wore it for 24 hours and it said I burned like 2600 and it shocked me because for my weight, an AMR calculator puts me at around 1800. It was surprising because from what I have heard (mainly from Jillian Michaels) HRM are THE most accurate way to measure calorie burn.
I can’t get over that your HR maxed over 200 in your sleep! Can that be possible??? I got up to around 185 during my 5k race! That must have been some dream! lol
June 5, 2009 at 2:26 pm
OMG! Your hr jumped to 204 in your sleep!? That is bizzare!
June 5, 2009 at 3:14 pm
i have no idea how accurate they are. i burned 1900 including sleeping AND including a 3-mile run and that was 23.5 hours of wear time!
June 5, 2009 at 3:24 pm
I have a Polar FT60 and I love it. I wear it around the office during the day and on average it seems like I burn 90-100 calories per hour just sitting at my desk. And when I work out at the gym, pretty much every day, I seem to average 600 calories per hour give or take 50. That was really disappointing to me b/c I was thinking I was burning so much more based on what the machines were telling me. Naive, I know!
Anyways, I love my HRM. It’s really put a new focus on my weight loss efforts. I’m a number cruncher like you…I like to figure out a mathematical equation to lose weight. I think it’s pretty accurate though…hell, it needs to be for the price I paid for it.
June 5, 2009 at 3:26 pm
This is interesting! I’m definitely wanting one now…
June 15, 2009 at 4:57 pm
Hey Jen!
Soooo nice to meet you on Saturday. You are exactly what I imagined in my head! You make me smile
I’m pretty sure HRMs aren’t really accurate when you’re not exercising — below a certain heart rate they aren’t that useful. I seem to remember something about this in my Polar booklet, but I can’t quite recall.
Fascinating nonetheless, especially the during sleep spike! I wonder if you had a bad dream?