Accurate Rollerblading Calories Burned?

[TorchuPanda]

Hi everyone! First time posting and I hope to come back a bunch more. I've had my Fitbit for a while, but haven't used it much lately because I doubted the accuracy. For one of my jobs I rollerblade, and I acknowledge that the Fitbit Charge is limited to the point that it can't pick up my strides, but at the same time the number of calories burned the activity log is giving me must be too high! There is no way I'm burning 2,000+ calories! I skate for 6-7 hours on days that I do work. It's nothing high speed, but more along the lines of burst activity. I am constantly on my feet for the 6-7 hours but I'm not constantly moving at a high rate. If you've ever heard of the Sonic restaurants you would understand. I basically am a waiter with skates on. I would like to be able to accuraately measure how many calories I am burning and base my intake on that. If you have any idea how to judge that or give me your best estimation that would be amazing!

[SebringDon]

@TorchuPanda

Without knowing your BMR, it's hard to supply an estimate, and since we don't know what type of Fitbit you have, we can't tell if heartrate factors into the equation. However, according to the American Cancer Institute, rollerblading has a MET of 6. That means you burn 6 times your BMR while rollerblading.

Let's use my numbers as an example. My hourly BMR is 72. Seven hours of rollerblading would be 72 * 6(MET) * 7(hours) calories for me, or 3,024 calories. Add in the rest of my daily BMR (72 * 17(hours)) = 1,224 calories and that totals 4,248 calories. Note that those figures assume I do nothing but rest the other 17 hours of the day; no getting ready for work, commuting, exercising, or anything but resting.

Now of course you have down time, when you're picking up orders, taking a break, whatever, and you're not going full-tilt all the time either. But your Fitbit's going to try to account for that, so I'd say it's probably not as far off as you think it is.