Do you think the calories burned is accurate?

[rwgood]

most of my workouts are sort of idiosyncratic,  high intensity, interval types. Are there any rules of thumb for estimating calories burned?

[WaltTN]

Best advice that I can give would be to get and wear a Heart Rate Monitor.  

[Odyssey13]

@rwgood  This article on calories burned might be helpful - click to read

Welcome to the forums.

[slysam]

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@rwgood wrote:

most of my workouts are sort of idiosyncratic,  high intensity, interval types. Are there any rules of thumb for estimating calories burned?

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Fitbit might do okay depending on the movements/exercises included in your exercises.  It does fine for me with some interval workouts depending on the moves. Though a lot of the non-cardio machine interval workouts popular at the moment are bodyweight calisthenics intervals and use exercises fitbit cannot track well like burpees, mountain climbers, etc. mixed in with exercises it can like jumping exercises, fast feet, etc. I had a heart rate monitor before a Fitbit and got my HRM because I do a variety of workouts that I usew to find difficult to classify or compare with each other and wanted an objective way to estimate calories and track fitness improvements and intensity of workouts. I have found my HRM does simplify things, but the calorie burn estimate isn't appropriate for every activity. The calorie burn is more for steady state aerobic exercise and would have a higher margin of error for everything else. I think there are lots of great reasons to wear a HRM during interval workouts (one is to have a record of how hard you worked each workout) but the problem with the calorie burn is most HRM's do use "average heart rate" as a key part of their calorie burn. So you can sometimes see a lower hrm calorie burn for an interval workout than for a steady state workout. If the workout duration is similar and the interval workout was more vigorous--I don't think that is actually true.  That may depend how fast your heart rate recovers though and I haven't really had any issues logging the calorie burn and eating accordingly.