Ionic Calorie Burning Excessive

[DanielleFit]

I have found that lately my Ionic is showing I am burning a lot more calories than normal. For instance, I was at the gym doing strength training the other day for 90 minutes and it said I burned 504 Calories... This seems like an excess as I was doing heavy weights with a lot rest periods. 
Has anyone else found this? Why is it happening?

[WavyDavey · Accepted solution]

Hi @DanielleFit,

500 calories burned for 90 minutes of heavy lifting sounds about right to me. Sometimes on heavy squat day, I'll get about 400 calories burned in an hour. Some of it depends on rest, but your numbers don't sound out of line. Was your Ionic reporting different numbers before? Also, what was your average HR reported for this workout?

[DanielleFit]

Interesting. I found that the last couple of weeks my calorie's burned have been significantly higher than the past six months or so?

[WavyDavey]

There could be a number of reasons.

One I've experienced is when I increase my endurance training and/or hypertrophy work, it allows me to take shorter rests while lifting. This ends up producing a higher average heart rate and higher calories burned.

You may also want to check your resting heart rate now from how it was six months ago. If it's elevated it can also increase calories burned.

In both these cases, the increase in calorie burns are explained by heart rate. If the increase you're seeing isn't valid, you should see an increase in your body weight. If that happens, you'd need to decrease calories in to compensate. The weight scale can be a valuable tool to help determine the accuracy of calories burned if intake is tracked as well.

I feel the lifting takes a lot of calories for recovery that aren't captured in the heart rates, so for me at least, 350-450 calories burned for an hour of lifting works out about right for my calorie in/out calculations. YMMV.

And welcome to the forums!

[DanielleFit]

Thank you! That's a lot of great information 🙂

My resting HR has decreased approx 7 bpm over the past 6 months, and I've started making gains.

So, all of this info is pretty valid.

I found, before, that most of my weight lifting sessions prior were closer to 300 calories for 60-90 min. I was fairly taken aback when I looked and saw 550 calories. It looks like my HR stayed at about 135 for most of the workout, spiked at one point to 169.

Thanks again!