Calorie Counters

Ever wonder why your Garmin says you burned 500 calories but another calorie tracker says you burned 700?

On today’s Extra Kick podcast, Coach Hayley shares what to look for when determining an accurate calorie count!


Audio Transcript

Coach Hayley: Hey everyone. I am your community manager here at Runners Connect. I will be here with your daily podcast this week.

I hope you are having a great day and thanks for tuning in today’s episode If you have a burning question that you would like one of our expert coaches to answer on the show, head over and submit it at runnersconnect.net/daily.

We’d love to help you improve so don’t hesitate to ask us what you need to know. Today we have a great question from Lauren.

Lauren: When I finished running my Garmin G.P.S. set up on 1002 calories. When I downloaded my data to the site, it is set up at 955. I wonder why there’s such a huge difference in reading. Any ideas?

Hayley: That’s an interesting question Lauren, and I’ll do my best to answer. The first thing to understand is that these are both only estimates.

Short of going to a lab and using some fancy equipment, you can only estimate how many calories that you’re burning.

That means that there’s likely to be some discrepancies. Different sites use different equations to calculate figures.

The accuracy of your Garmin depends on the data that it is available. So, the Garmin will take into account your body weight, so make sure that you’ve entered this correctly.

If you’re wearing your heart rate monitor, then you’ll also use this data to calculate calories then this will add to the accuracy.

By using heart rate, you can put together a fairly accurate estimate of calories spent during your run.

If you weren’t using heart rate monitor, this is likely to be a bit of a rough estimate using weight and miles that you completed.

Our calculator would take into account your weight, distance, and pace to estimate the calories you used.

Again, though this is just an estimate. A different formula is probably used to what the Garmin uses and the several formulas out there none which is proven to be more accurate over another.

The number of calories that you’ve burnt on your run would depend on your individual metabolic rate as well as how hard you’re working.

The terrain that you’re running on will also have an effect on this. For example, a hill route will increase calorie burn but most calculators don’t include this metric.

I have more faith in a calorie estimate that includes heart rate to give you a result that will give you a good indicator of how hard you’re working.

If you are wearing your heart rate monitor and your Garmin I would suggest that it be a better guide.

All in all, it’s pretty difficult to know exactly how many calories you’re run is burning. It’s also not necessary. If you really want to know exactly how many calories you are using up per mile at a certain pace, you can go to a lab and test this on a treadmill. That’s not necessary for most people’s goals though.

This is especially true because food intake is as difficult to calculate as energy expenditure. Trying to get either precisely is futile.

A first estimate can be helpful and having a precise total wouldn’t necessarily be much more helpful.

If you’re trying to maintain your weight, then I wouldn’t worry too much about working out how many calories you’re burning replacing anyway.

You can track of your weight and making slight adjustments as needed is a much better way to do this.

Then just focus on high quality nutritious foods and eating to satisfy your hunger. Eating until you’re full but no more.

If you’re calculating your calories to try and lose weight, again it’s not really necessary to have a precise figure.

To lose weight, you need a rough calorie deficit of 500 per day. Being at 450 or 550 won’t really harm your efforts either way, especially given that it’s so hard to know exactly how many calories you’re taking in tea.

Even apps like My Fitness Pal, their labels in their own packet, they’re all estimates as well.

To sum up, the difference in the in the sums you’re getting it’s due to differences in the formulas that are used to calculate calories spent.

Calorie figures apart from those calculated in the lab with some special equipment, are just estimates and using the estimates one or the other won’t really hurt your weight loss or your replacements efforts anyway.

I hope that helps to explain things. I’m sure lots of runners were probably wondering the same thing so thanks for asking that question Lauren.

For those of you listening that want to have your questions answered by one of the writers couldn’t coaches, head over to runnersconnect.net/daily and click the record to send your question over.

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