Logging climbing

[oat_bran]

I've been (indoor) climbing and bouldering for 8 months now and I would like to know if anyone has an idea what would be the best way to log/track this exercise? For a long time I used to do it only once a week, so I didn't bother logging it and just relied on the calorie burn estimate based on my heart rate. 

But recently I started climbing 2-3 times a week and as I progress on the level of routes that I climb my workouts become more intense. Here's the thing though, climbing is mostly composed of short intense bursts of activity including a lot of resistance and anaerobic exercise bursts followed by periods of rest. Because of how short each burst usually is, my fitbit doesn't even recognise it as exercise most of the time. And the thing is, I may feel exhausted after climbing a difficult route, but my rate heart doesn't even go up that much because it's mostly resistance-based activity. So if I don't log it as anything and only rely on the heart rate monitor to estimate the calorie burn, it will be definitely too low. I mean, sometimes I leave the climbing gym completely exhausted with my every muscle burning but my fitbit says I barely burned any calories.

For the record, I had my fitbit for almost 3 years now and use a spreadsheet to track how accurate it is based on my intake which I also track and changes in my weight and it has been almost spot on in its estimates. And I'd say I have a good feeling at this point of whether I burned a lot of energy or not depending on how tired I feel.  I'm assuming that even though my heart rate doesn't go up by much, there are extra calories burned from the aerobic effort and from the muscle recovery afterwards (same as with weight training). The thing is, I have no idea how much more calories on top of the heart rate-based estimate?

Simply looking for "rock climbing" in the activity list and then entering the time I arrive and leave the gym wouldn't work, because it assumes I climbed non-stop for these few hours and gives insanely inflated estimates. I mean, when you arrive at the climbing gym, you usually climb, you rest while you belay someone, you climb, you may take a longer pause etc. So the time you spend at the climbing gym and the time you actually climb are two different things. Manually logging each climb seems unrealistic. 

So what I've been lately is simply adding 30-50 extra calories depending on how intense my climbing session was trying to account for that extra burn from the aerobic muscle work and recovery for a 3 hour climbing session. But that's obviously nothing than a guess. Anyone got a better idea? Maybe you know what would be a more accurate estimate of these extra calories?

[WavyDavey]

I would log it as Workout. The calories burned is largely based off heart rate activity, so if the exercise is intermittent, you may not see huge calories burned counts or a lot of active minutes. I get the same thing with weightlifting--the rest periods tend to lower the overall exertion more than flat-out activity.

The intensity of such exercises (this, crossfit) is great enough that adding some calories to your meals would probably be useful.

You want to start the exercise mode on the watch itself. Using the auto-recognition may get funky with this type of activity.

[Overtrainer]

Interesting, I'm looking around to confirm my fitbit numbers when climbing.  I do weight lifting, typically 1 hour sessions with a focus on free weights.  I'm 35 around 190lb and around 25%bf.  I burn around 350-450 per gym 1h session using "weights" exercise program.

For climbing, I burn around 600 calories per hour, sometimes lasting 2 hours if it's top rope stuff.  That's using the "Workout" program as you suggest.  It seems high for me, being able to knock out 1200 calories in 2 hours.