Common Skin Infections

Learn How to Build Automated Traffic Machines

If your like me, you workout really hard on your fitness machines and come off them only when your soaked with sweat. You feel great looking down at the calories burnt as you notice they're approaching 500 in only a short session. But how do we know that we actually burnt off that exact amount?

It's great that you've been working and pushing yourself on your cardio machines, but the focus of this information is to think if we should trust what our machines are telling us and act accordingly. By all means feel good about working out, but don't get too carried away, because as the professionals say, there read outs are just estimates and no where near exact.

"What consumers need to bear in mind would be that the readouts are meant to be an estimate of energy expenditure," said Mark Reinking, assistant professor of physical therapy at St. Louis University. "There are good data from lots of research through the years of about how much energy it costs to do certain activities.

Well it is made more accurate by inputting figures like age and weight, these are then used to estimate how much energy someone of your age and weight would usually use when doing the kind of activity that you're doing. This will then output the calories that it is estimated you have burnt.

So you can use the calorie burn readout as a benchmark, but rely by yourself personal feeling about the progress you are making. And if you are utilizing the same machine again and again, you should use the readout as a relative report on how you have progressed during a period of time.

It might not tell me exactly how many calories I've burned, but I can use it as a way to benchmark my progress. If your elliptical shows that you burned 300 calories, and a month later, as you build up your cardio you see you have burned 400 calories, then Yes you are improving.

You should realize however that you could jump on another treadmill, or whatever you were using, and see that your burning less on it. That's just because different models have different ways of calculating and you should not take them as being precise.

There are a number of factors that go into calculating calories burned, including who's working out on the elliptical trainer, their muscle mass, conditioning, resting metabolism, and other variables.

Visit our bodybuilding blog.