I have just exercised, but this time, for a shorter two mile distance. Yesterday’s previous value of 125 calories per mile was when I went only a half a mile at an average heart rate of 133. Keep in mind the net calorie burn may actually be 105. Anyway, I was not putting myself out too much here. So I did not burn up that many calories. This time today I really pushed myself. I was exhausted at the end of each mile. My pace averaged a record 14 minutes per mile. My heart rate averaged about 150, and toward the end with excursions above 170 bpm. Not a good idea. My watch tells me I burned 140 calories a mile. This difference makes sense, but the actual values may be off. So I will be using the values from the watch as gross calories burned.

My watch tells me that I have burned 258 calories on my running intervals. So this means that when considering BMR, the net calories burned comes out to 221 calories for 1.87 miles. This comes out 118 calories per mile. I do not think this figure is too far off. This compares to yesterday’s value of 105 calories per mile.

I find my watch is designed to be accurate for only the more intensive exercises. I guess marathon runners do not give themselves points for walking. I walked an additional 0.37 miles at 3.4 mph. I did not record all of my walking. Still, this is not worth considering. Now if I need to consider my walking today, I need something to go by which is better than nothing, like using MET values. There are problems with using MET values such as it does not consider a way from this to consider ones resting metabolism, or estimate basically the actual physical exertion involved for a specific individual doing a specific exercise.

I looked up the recent documentation from the organization that establishes a reference of MET values for each activity. MET values used to calculate calories burned can underestimate by 25% or much more just on differences in ones BMR alone. One scientific study supports this and more. I have calculated an estimate of the conversion factor in order for me to calculate a more accurate MET for myself. This turns out to be 1.23, which makes for a 23% difference or even more, depending how you calculate BMR. Now this makes more sense to me. Keep in mind using this conservative 23% difference applied to let’s say 400 calories of exercise would still make for a difference of at least 92 calories. This is another example of calculations given online working better for fitter individuals. This and the BMR calculators themselves.

Note that BMR is Basal Metabolic Rate. There are calculators for this on the Net. The calculation for the correction factor for MET values using BMR is given on that orginization’s website found below. There you will also find MET values for thousands of activities.

https://sites.google.com/site/compen...corrected-mets