Originally Posted by
bigbones73
That is quite the equation. Traditionally, I have not been a calorie counter but I have been reading some articles which piqued my interest. I have been using Spark People to log my miles. Today I rode my bike 8 miles and according the their formula, I burned 799 calories. It just seemed like I had worked awfully hard for such a minimal calorie count. I'm happy with my bike riding gains and as I said, I'm not really overly concerned about the calorie thing but it just seemed that maybe Clydes should get some type of bonus.
CardioTrainer on my HTC Evo says on Sunday I did 16.6 miles which was relatively flat, in 77 minutes, averaging 12.9 mph, for a total burn of 906 calories. That was with a 10 minute stop halfway to see why my bike path was closed off with chicken wire. I wouldn't disagree 73 that you might have expended more effort than me for your 8 miles, but unless you were on a serious climb for those 8 miles, in a serious headwind, or were on a far more inefficient bike than my Allez, I can't imagine that you only burned 107 calories less than me but rode less than half the distance.
I definitely don't want to make light of the effort you expended, and I would agree that those bigger than me at 5'10"/200 would burn more, but at the same time I can't imagine that you could be burning twice as much, bikes just aren't geared at the same level walking or climbing stairs are, then I might give you closer to a 40% bonus to calorie counting.
Moral of the story, calorie counters must not be particularly accurate, take the numbers with a grain of salt. In fact given the vagaries of GPS antennas and battery saving measures of mobile devices, I wouldn't trust my distance or speed to be particularly accurate either.