I was reading the other day about how all sports watches and fitness bands give bogus results on how many calories your body is burning. I am kind of starting to understand why that could be because of pickleball that I do every now and then.
My watch doesn't have a pickleball setting but it has tennis so I just put that on there. I really don't think that the watch uses any sort of different algorithm no matter what activity you tell it to track though so I don't know why I even bother other than to be able to look in my history and see what I have done. I mean how could it?
I'm pretty sure the watch and accompanying app simply detects your average heart rate and then multiplies it by some formula to give you a caloric readout.
This latest pickleball one though, it cannot possibly be true.
If you have never played pickleball you might not know that it is a lot of rushed movement for a few seconds, maybe a bit more, but mostly it is all about standing around and waiting for the ball to head your way. This is in doubles of course, I'm sure singles are a lot more heated and there is more running involved but the court is pretty small so there really isn't much reason to run a great deal chasing the ball.
You might have to lunge a few steps but this isn't a terribly demanding sport yet my watch tells me that I burned 500 calories in 45 minutes and I don't think there is any way that could possibly be true. When I ran 10km the other day, encompassing 13,000 steps, my watch told me I burned 700 and that was far more taxing.
I suppose if we were to try to look at this in a good way I am actually trying to get to zone 3 or aerobic level of heart rate as much as possible and without me even trying to do that I am able to get there for most of the time while I am playing pickleball - so I guess this is a good thing.
I also think that the system takes an average of your overall heart rate and then multiplies it by some number to come up with the calories. It likely can't be any more complicated that that since this watch was just over $100. I think there are spikes in my heart rate for sure during some long rallies but like I said, most of pickleball is a bunch of standing around and reaching for the ball if it comes your way.
I do like doing this though because it is certainly more engaging than just running by myself and listening to music. I'll keep doing it but I am not going to really consider the caloric readout to be at all accurate.