Runners World Calorie Counter

My guess is that the Suunto shows only the extra calories you have burnt through running. The RW one includes your base metabolism - i.e. the calories that you would have burnt anyway if you had not gone running - which nearly all of these calorie counter things do even though it's daft.

...although the base metabolism wouldn't make more than 100 calories difference, so I may be talking carp as usual.

Calories burnt get worked out from the Hr on sunnto's, I think, not entirely sure but it's all relative.

If you burn 3500kcals a week in excercise on your sunnto and you are not losing any weight at a constant food intake, incr your excercise to 3750kcals etc. You are just mesuring the difference.

We've had this discussion before - and its a bit tricky.

I dont think the HR makes any difference.  You run a mile or walk a mile - you will burn the same calories in that time. The only difference being that your body will carry on burning a few extra calories after the run until you recover.

Try not to think about it too much.

Cheers cougs, my brain hurts!

<don't say "I did warn you!>

Is it the same princaple as

Walk or run a mile in the rain, you get just as wet doing either?

More like work, energy and power 101

The energy developed to move you that mile is what is being used for the calorific burn.

It's not quite true that running a mile is the same as working. Gross work is the same but the delta V requires more energy as well.

English please stump!

We burn x amount of cals just being "in neutral" so then when we slip into gear more fuel is burnt on top?

And therefore the way to measure this difference is to measure your heart rate.

If I run on a treadmill for 20 minutes at max heartrate I'm going to burn more calories than walking for 20 minutes!

There still seems some confusion between the 2 methods, miles done calculator done by weight and the haert rate done by most HRM. I personally would go by the HRM calcualtor and add the static calories mentioned by Kryten. It seems more accurate.

At 12 stone, on an hours steady state run(about 7 miles) I usually burn around 700 calories. The RW calc says 891 calories. I'd now go for about 800, as I mentioned earlier, in between the two.

JF - if you run at max hr for 20 mins - you will have covered a lot more distance than by walking 20 mins ? 

Well I hope anyway for your sake !

CW I've always worked on the approx 100 calories per mile scenario, but then add the calories you would have burnt anyway, as mentioned by Kryten, this then makes sense.

Point taken Cougie!

So does this mean that if I run 5 miles very very fast that I burn the same amount of calories as if I'd run it slowly?  Sounds a bit odd to me.

Sure the calculator helps me see what I've burned on my run, but unless I know my burn rate on other activities, do I really know how many 'extra' calories or pies I can eat?

If we assume 2500 cals per 24 hours, say twice as much in the day as at night, means about 120 cals an hour in the day just doing normal stuff.  At 8 minute miling for 1 mile you should get about 16 cals for living and 100 cals for the running.  

Trouble is that the more training you do, the more weight you lose and a lighter body takes fewer calories to run the miles so you can't eat as many pies as you used to !