Calories burned vastly different for two people doing same exercise

[Panayiota]

My husband and I both have the Fitbit Surge. What we have noticed is that even though we are doing identical exercise my hudband's calories burned is much higher than mine. For example, this evening we completed together a run and a circuit, the exercise we did was identical, however my calories burned during these exercises was 292 while my husband's was 509. What's the reason for the large discrepancy? My steps were slightly higher as was my average heart rate so I would have expected the my calories burned to be slightly higher also, but obviously it's not.

So how does Fitbit calculate calories burned during exercise? What goes into the calculation to result in the discrepancy above?

Thanks in advance.

[SteveH · Accepted solution]

There are 2 elements to fitbit's calculation of calorie burn. The first is the assessment of effort and the second is the calculation of BMR calories. The latter are calories you burn just keeping your body alive. These are calculated from your profile settings such as gender, age, weight etc. I suspect that your husband may be heavier than you so his portion of BMR calories will be higher than yours causing the difference.

http://help.fitbit.com/articles/en_US/Help_article/How-does-Fitbit-know-how-many-calories-I-ve-burne...

[WendyB]

You also need to realize men burn more calories than women do. They also lose weight faster.

[Panayiota]

Well that sux! I guess I'll just have work harder!!

Thanks very much for your replies.

[madmen]

@Panayiota  my girlfriend and I have weekly competitions to keep us motivated and one of the competitions is Total Calories Burned but because men burned more calories, my girlfriend did a research and broke it down in a simple infographic that I'm sharing 😉