Don’t trust that gym machine!

A few weeks ago I told you to stop lying about your age to your gym machine.  Now I’m back to tell you the sad news that your gym machine has been lying to you.  Who (or what) can you trust these days?

I was working out at the gym this morning wearing my newly resuscitated (new batteries) heart rate monitor.  The monitor is programmed with my age (sort of…see the previous post), height, weight, gender.  I don’t usually wear the monitor.  I’m content just to be moving and sweating and working on keeping my fitness level up (and my bio age down).  I am not an obsessive counter of either calories in or calories out.

But the night before I had overindulged in blackberry cobbler topped with vanilla ice cream.  It’s the first time I’ve had dessert in probably two months.  Yes, I’m that good.  Hate me later.  So there I was eating this sweet, juicy luscious dessert I had made – and therefore knew just how caloric it was – thinking “okay, relax…you can work this off tomorrow at the gym.”  I figured, given the modest portion size I ate – and, oh yeah, the several immodest spoonfuls I inhaled while transferring the left-overs to a covered dish – I should try to burn 600 calories the next day to circumvent a 24-hour marathon of negative self-talk.

What would it take to burn those calories?  I was about to find out.  I headed to the gym, strapped on the monitor and got down to it.  There’s almost nothing as boring as hearing about other people’s workouts – unless it’s hearing about the accomplishments of other people’s children –so I’ll try to make this brief.  I started with 10 minutes of high-intensity intervals on each of 4 common gym machines.  Here’s a comparison of my calorie burn according to my monitor (touted to be highly accurate) and my calorie burn according to the gym machines’ calculations.

Row: 51 monitor (94 machine)

EFX: 53 monitor (87 machine)

Spin bike: 76 monitor (98 machine)

Stair stepper: 63 (114 machine)

Let me do the math for you. (Actually, my husband helped with this)  The machines erroneously informed me that I had burned 161.7 percent MORE calories than I’d actually burned.  That’s because machines in most gyms are calibrated for some “average” person who is not me or you, unless you are a 35-year-old, 170-lb man.

So, don’t get snookered by those inflated numbers you see on the read-outs.  Don’t feel smug when the machine tells you you’ve torched 200 calories after a mere 20 minutes.  You haven’t.

It took me 100 long, sweaty minutes to burn those 600 calories. Yes, 1 hour and 40 minutes.  Was the blackberry cobbler with ice cream worth it?  Oh yeah.