I've been trying to figure out the most optimal way to burn calories for myself using what I presume is not the best technology out of my $120 sport watch. I realize that this data isn't going to be super accurate but since I am going the exercise anyway I may as well try to figure something out and be a bit scientific about it, right?
Well after 3 or 4 trials I thought I had it figured out because I was able to repeat the results of a 5km run vs a 5km walk both burning around 400 active calories. I thought I had it all figured out but then my data stopped following that pattern even though I felt like I was repeating the same steps.
Here's something to understand though: I am going to do this exercise anyway, I just wanted to see if I could figure something else out in the process. On a couple of days I ran and then walked 5km one after the other and they ended up burning around the same amount of 400 calories or so. Obviously the walked 5k took longer but the total burn was the same.
Then yesterday I ran a 5k at a zone 3 / just barely breaking zone 4 BPM heart rate and then walked and ran the rest of it just "however i felt like" for a total of 10km.
The total calories burned was lower than 400 calories per 5k. I really don't know what to make of this. My pace was all over the place in the 2nd half, this much is certain.
Also, my heart rate, as you would expect, was up and down all over the place in the 2nd 5k whereas i was intentionally keeping it around the same place for the first 5k.
There's probably some science out there that says having your heart rate jumping up and down is "better" for you but at the same time there is always some scholarly article that "proves" the exact opposite as well. This is why I am not really trying to prove anything for other people, I am just trying to see what works for me based on the very low-level tech that I am dealing with right now.
In the end it would appear that even though a worked longer and kind of harder, that my overall burn per minute is lower and that doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense to me.
Not to mention the fact that about a week ago I did exactly the same thing as this but stopped the timer between the first and second 5k sessions.
So there are a number of factors that I think could be at play here. It could be that the watch or the software treats new exercise sessions as something that is deserving of a "bonus" amount of calories or something like that and if that is the case that is kind of stupid but there will be nothing I can do about that. I'm not trying to cheat my way to fake calories getting burned so I am not going to try to game the system like that.
There also could be the case that it is getting a lot colder where I live week-by-week and this could be affecting my heart rate or something? I dunno.
I am taking a day off right now to allow my poor ankles to recover but then I am going to do this whole thing again in a similar fashion and see what results I get there.
If you have any recent running results and you don't mind posting the data here I would appreciate any additional information i can get.